Posts (page 2)

"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...

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."

"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.