Posts (page 2)

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."

"Who's the big guy?"

"It's 'Mogenar' who I assume is the main boss for planet Bryyo.  And he's a total bastard."

"Looks good.  What is this?"

"Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.  Yeah, it's the first decent FPS I've played on the Wii.  And probably one that'll be regarded as the first of the Wii's second generation of games.  I'm playing bounty hunter Samus Aran."

"Shamus?  An Irish protagonist?"

"Samus.  A female protagonist."

"Ah, another post-Lara Croft videogame action-woman."

"Pre-Lara, by around a decade.  Of course in the original 8-bit 80s version she was only revealed to be female in a twist-ending.  But, you know, small steps.  The entire series has this complicated mythology which, two decades later, is still based on the the original platform-shooter.  Which is why you're still fighting the cheesy sounding 'Space Pirates'."

"So you have to stop them from uploading their space warez to the galactic internet?"

"Well, they've performed some kind of attack on the galactic computer network.  So I have to travel to different planets and wipe out their infection, and take on Dark Samus."

"Dark Samus?"

"Not really sure.  I haven't played any of the other Metroid Prime games - except for that DS download where your main ememy appears to be scrivener's palsy.   Dark Samus appears to be an evil doppelgänger of Samus made out of Phazon."

"And Phazon?"

"It's like the weapon and alien energy source of the Space Pirates.  Samus gets infected with it in this game, but she has a suit that lets her control it.  It acts as a sort of steroid - space-testosterone if you will.  You get to harness greater power, but at the risk of losing your control."

"Wait, you're a woman fighting 'testosterone-creatures'?  You're sure this game doesn't have a radical feminist subtext?"

"Hardly.  Anyway, if you'll excuse me, I have to keep hitting this guy in his balls because I've been ordered to destroy his seed."

Ah, PictoChat.  After the London Games Geek Quiz, I lamented that the problem with PictoChat is that, since nobody expects strangers to be using PictoChat, nobody even checks to see if anyone is available.  Of course the sheer unlikelihood of random PictoChat connections occurring (the system's wireless range is only about 10-30 metres) hasn't prevented bizarre "child predator" stories from appearing.

Perhaps if Nintendo could take a page from the "Orange Film Fund" book and have PictoChat used in some dramatic movie context?  It worked for the Power Glove after appearing in The Wizard.  Probably.

Some Hitchcockian techno-thriller?   Like how a random phonecall is used in "Cellular", but... where the people communicating can only be about 30m apart. So a story we see unfold in a fixed location from a fixed POV - like "Rear Window".  This would be my elevator pitch:

A man flies into London and gets into his hotel room quite late.  Due to jet lag he's not tired enough to sleep so tries to kill an hour on his DS, but accidentally hits PictoChat in the system menu.  He notices that, oddly, there are two users in Chatroom A.  So, what the hell, he joins the room and types "hello".  A message comes back from one of the other people in the chatroom: "please help us".

The users of the chatroom (which he assumes to be children) explain that they are being held hostage by armed men.  They've been denied access to phones, etc. But their captors allowed them to keep their Nintendo DSes to calm them down.  They've been secretly communicating with each other via PictoChat, and this is the first contact they've had with the outside world.  The man is sceptical at first, but intrigued.  Eventually he tells them he's going to call their bluff and have hotel security verify their story.  But they tell him they're not in a hotel - they're in an embassy.  He looks out of his window to see the embassy of a small, fictional, country on the other side of the street. A country whose name he's been hearing frequently mentioned on the 24 hour news channel in his room.  All the embassy's curtains are drawn.

A man with only a PictoChat session has to convince the authorities that a major international incident is unfolding.  Spies, diplomats, terrorists, SAS-style rescues.  And a DS in almost every shot.

Even if there's not a movie in it, maybe a fake trailer?

Last Monday the BBC announced a deal with The Cloud where people would be able to view content from bbc.co.uk without paying the wireless ISP's normal connection charge.

Or to put it another way: in order to view content from websites that haven't signed a special deal with the ISP you will need to pay an additional free.

Read that last bit again - it's the Network Neutrality end-game that everyone seems to get so excited about.  I waited a week for condemnation from the usual sources.  It never seemed to come.  Why hasn't Auntie been lambasted by Mr Doctorow?  Where's the ORG press memo?

Is it because it's not a wired, ADSL, provider (and therefore, presumably, not a monopoly)?  Is it because it's (currently) only the one corporation that's signed up?  Is it because something that used to cost money is now free, rather than something else becoming more expensive?  Or is it because "it's their network, and they should be free to decide these things.  If you don't like it go elsewhere".

What's the magic formula for neutralising the Network Neutrality argument?  Enquiring minds want to know.

As a child there was something fascinating about flexi-discs.  A thin, flexible, (often) translucent reflection of dark rigid reality.  That these things worked in the same way as real records seemed slightly subversive, naughty. Of course, when I was playing my copy of "Poo Poo Tinkle Tinkle Parp Parp Oink", I had no idea that the the technology's history was based in subversion - the audio samizdat of Soviet Russia.

Earlier this year NME distributed a Babyshambles single as a flexi-disc it seemed a little ironic.  After all who, other than bedroom DJs, still buys record players?

Today, one of the newspapers in the UK (not one I'd buy) distributed a ballroom dancing DVD.  But interestingly it wasn't a DVD.  While the paper referred to it as such, the disc itself wasn't marked with the DVD logo, and referred to itself as an Ecodisk.  Half the thickness of regular DVD means it can claim to have half the environmental impact, but more importantly flexible.

Flexi-discs live on, at least for everyone apart from Apple users. Oh dear.

I've just watched The Bourne Ultimatum.  It's an excellent action movie/travelogue, but not as all-round entertaining as, say, Die Hard 4.0 due to the utter lack of humour.  Bourne's been described as an "anti-James Bond" in some of the publicity interviews. Principally, because Bond, like anyone who works in a field dealing with death, has developed a dark humour as a coping mechanism.  Bourne kills, but kills without quips.

Director Paul Greengrass critizised Bond for "wearing Prada suits", seemingly oblivious to the fact that his protagonist runs about with a grand's worth of shiny Tag Heuer on his wrist.  Presumably because wearing a watch worth more than most men's suits fits in nicely with the "low profile" look they were trying to achieve
with the wardrobe?

Oh, and also he "doesn't rely on high-tech gadgets".  This is, of course, balls.  Bourne makes extensive use of cell phones in all three movies - a gadget that would have been considered pretty fantastical if featured in the bulk of Bond movies.

One of the reasons Bond movies of the 60s were popular was because they presented their spycraft gadgets as objects of  everyday commuter mundanity. Wristwatches.  Briefcases.  Bowler hats.  The possibility of a world existing just below the surface.

There was a time when wireless radio headsets were the sort of thing you'd see in  "send-a-team-in" movies (You know: an elite team of well armed, technologically tricked out, highly trained operatives are sent in to deal with an unknown threat.  One by one they're picked off - and the only survivor is usually some unlikely civilian.  A botanist, say.  With a gammy leg or something).  These days a bluetooth earpiece hardly bestows its wearer with any dangerous glamour.

The gap between movie fantasy and everyday mudanity for gadgets can be smaller than the time between sequels.  By 2007 the movie world's CIA is apparently using Google Maps to track targets.  CIA computers protected by Norton Anti-virus.  By comparison, the real-world's supervillian "box-cutters" are already widely available.

One thing that struck me is that, for a globe-trotting movie, Bourne doesn't seem to fly anywhere. Maybe it fits in the logic of the movie as a security/tradecraft thing?  He's in cars, and conspicuously on trains, buses and boats, but never on planes.  For example, the journey from London to Madrid seems to be via train - presumably via Paris again.  (Although I assume some unseen leg of his trip to New York would have been by plane).

The CIA guys seem to fly everywhere.  In Supremacy, Pam Landy flies from Berlin to Washington DC for a few hours and then flies back to Berlin.  Maybe, in the the current climate of eco-sensitivity, it's a subtle way of separating good from bad, especially now that no-one's allowed to smoke any more.

Why all the interweb hate directed towards 3D Mailbox?  I think it's cute.

It's not something I'd ever use myself, especially in its present form.  However I do like the idea taking a normally dryly presented system state and turning it in to an amusing hack.  For example those novelty programs that list system processes in the form of a lava lamp or a Doom level.

And it's the not the first time email has found itself in a games interface. I remember being highly amused the first time the mail daemon rushed through a nethack level to deliver me email.  This also featured in later games such as Black and White in which the avatar of deliverer keeps the name of the sender and joins your villagers.

I think visualisations might be more useful as ambient tools rather than interfaces.  I remember a few years back there was a paper (USENIX?) describing a monitoring system that used jungle noises to represent various system states (a bird tweets every time a mail is delivered, and so on).  These sounds would be pumped into a sysadmin's office and over time the sysadmin would become aware of the health of the system based on sound.

It was a nice idea, but doomed.  Any decent speaker system under the control of professional sysadmin is, in my experience, not going to be playing soothing birdsong.

If I had a second monitor and the the cycles to spare, I'd love to have some kind of continuous 3D helicopter flyby of my data, not just email but everything I might want to keep an eye on: network, disk space, backups, the lot.  And if it was a licensed version of Mainframe from ReBoot?  Well, that would be just awesome.

Last week David Cameron asked record companies to curb 'damaging' lyrics and at the same time rejected the findings of Gowers and offered them a copyright extension.

Certainly if one is dependent on the other, it's very difficult to see how that would work.  Universal agreement to censorship across the entertainment industry?  Worldwide? Would a Prime Minister Cameron be photographed signing a historical peace accord with Xzibit? Nonsense.

In the popular imagination the Tory heartlands of middle-England are incensed that, while the tools of censorship and the economic pressures of age-classification can be imposed on movies and video games, they can't control the awful awful noise that hoodlums listen to.

So if copyright terms can be utilised as a policy tool, why not as a stick rather than a carrot?

Why not introduce legislation that can selectively reduce the legal protections of copyright legislation.  If a judge finds a particular piece of 'art' to be damaging to society, then give them the power to remove or restrict the benefits that the law provides.

This isn't strictly censorship - it's an extension of the economic pressure for self regulation that already exists, especially for the movie industry.  Bruce Willis doesn't get to properly use his Yippee-Ki-Ai catchphase in Die Hard 4.0, not because of censorship, but because of the economic pressure of age classification.

Remember, record companies are claiming that 70 years of protection are needed for recordings.  If that's to be believed, then just the likelihood of protection dropping to 5 or 10 years would presumably make investment in anti-social art-forms too risky.

Copyright isn't natural law, it's always been intended primarily as a legal tool for public policy aims.  The fact that it has always seemed in confluence with the aims of publishers doesn't mean that should always be the case.