Google broke!

You’ll certainly not find this post, as Google is broken. Every link comes with a malware warning, and clicking through is not possible, you have to copy-paste every link. I didn’t realise how crippling this would turn out to be until i tried typing ‘hotmail’ into my firefox address bar. normally google handles this and directs me straight there if the link is obvious enough, but with every link a potential threat, i end up right back at google.com with a list of unclickable searches for ‘hotmail.’

oh well. http://hotmail.com for me. Dark ages have come again.

Star Wars and why Sony are better than you

My buddy Jon said it best; they should have just let Lucas make this, as it was clearly the film he wanted to make, and brought someone good in to make the new three episodes. But there you go, franchise murder is not an actual crime. (yet)

advertising trends.

Something getting real old real fast in the advertising world is adverts whose wow factor (god I hate that term) rests solely on the ‘they really did it you know’ principle. The Sony Bravia adverts with the plasticine rabbits? Brilliant! The age-old but still brilliant ‘cog’ ad – inspired. However, adverts of this ilk have convinced lazy executives that pouring money into an advert just so they can do something ‘for real’ is going to net them an audience and a viral video gold medal at the 2.0lympics. (pat on the back for coining that excellent phrase)

The lazy man’s ‘really doing it’ is stopmotion animation, which you might have noticed, is featured in every advert ever. It tries to be altogether too subtle – observe, dear audience, as we carefully and painstakingly manipulate this box/wall/traffic cone/wicker chimp until it appears to move as if by magic. If we can’t do it professionally enough, we’ll just throw in some crayon-drawn font and some sappy acoustic guitar music and suddenly it’s an indie-advert. Magic.

Conversely, Sony blew paint over whole apartment blocks, ruining them forever. That takes scale, money and a bold disregard for public safety. It says to me, “Hey, we’re Sony, and we don’t give a crap if you buy our TVs because, frankly, we can cover whole buildings with paint on a whim, and we can get a helicoptor team to film it, and we can win awards for doing so. Can you do that, pitiful human? Didn’t think so. Buy Sony.”

Another thing the TV is oversaturated with is adverts featuring music 50 years old, poorly recorded and sung in a funny voice, a throwback to a time when you could get away with composing a song about brushing your teeth, or choosing car insurance. Perhaps these composers of years past were wiser than we think. Maybe they knew one day people would pay through the nose to use their nonsense songs in trendy adverts and saw a way to secure a future for their grandchildren. Writing music sneakily intended for adverts shall be known as the ’song 2′ principle.

Brace brace brace

I am about to watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Brace for impact.

When is it the future then?

There are TVs on my train. They’re pretty small and the sound is tinny, but it’s pretty futuristic, or certainly would have seemed so to me when i was teeny-tiny. I can watch video on the move (video obviously top of the media hierarchy above music and photos, respectively second and third) and there are moving adverts on the walls. There are electric cars on the streets! Everyday things are touchscreen, like self-service checkouts or the self-posting (they don’t actually post themselves) machines in the post office, which they’ve put on the opposite side of the room from the service desks, so you can choose, like a puppy, who you love more.

All of this is pretty cool, especially the robots stealing human jobs, now THAT’S the future. But why doesn’t it feel quite like we’ve arrived yet? Aside from the obvious omission (hoverboards) what brilliant futuristic cliches are we missing?

1. Voice-controlled everything. Well, actually we have the technology for this, it’s just a terrible idea. So really, we’re super-futuristic, having been futuristic and rejected it.

2. Self-drying clothes. I assume the heating elements you’d have to fill your jumper with would be bulky and dangerous, but surely with a little more research this is within reach?

3. Anti-gravity. OK, i know this one is incredibly out there, but it’s a staple of science-fiction. Furthermore i would like an anti-gravity playpark, in a huge warehouse.

4. Teleporting. This one surely is feasible – just a reading of all my molecular data sent to the teleportation destination, where i am assembled again out of atoms they have knocking around. (Actually this one gives me the heebie-jeebies, because technically you’d die every time you teleported – but i might willingly die for faster travel.)

5. Stem-cell miracles/bionic limbs. Come ON people! i’m still young, and i want miracle live-forever organ replacement before i get too old. I’d be gutted if i was the last generation to get ever get old and die, let’s get a move on! As for bionic limbs, i think this plays to a deep desire in all of us to be able to punch through walls.

Have this issues rectified and get back to me.

On the nature of Excitement

Something has gone out of Hollywood that once was there. In the glory days of cinema (by which i mean, of course, the eighties) describing a film to a friend was easy. A film’s quality could be summed up with this simple formula:

“Awwww, there’s this one bit, where x“

x being some fantastic thing to happen. Here are some example substitutions for x

“he’s about to shoot this velociraptor, but then it looks like a plant but it isn’t and suddenly it’s right next to his face and he’s like, “clever girl” and then it totally eats him to pieces!”

“she’s holding onto the fence and when the blast wave hits her it totally blows all her skin off and her skeleton is there going AAAAHHHH”

“he pulls open the spaceship door and the alien bursts out and is all like UUEEAAERGH and he punches it in the face and goes, “welcome to Earth.”"

“Nick Cage is walking up the plane having kicked everyone’s ass, and someone shoots him as he’s walking, but he does not register it in the slightest, not in his movement or his facial expression. he just keeps going.”

Films today are missing these simple idioms. it’s almost as if back in the day directors and writers would wake up and say, “y’know, i’m not sure how to fit it in, but i’d like it if we could find a way to have the main character punch a shark in the face at some point.” the art is not totally lost – in films like Speed Racer (the best film of the 2000-2020 period) we can be sure, when we watch, that the Wachowskis certainly woke up and thought, “at some point Racer X should flip his car over, into the path of another car which is already doing a somersault and contains a screaming viking and also has huge spikes on chains all over it, and whilst he’s upside down near the other guy he punches him in the face and goes YEEEEAH!” I’m pretty sure this writing process is the system behind the hit TV show ‘24.’ the hard part, the bit that seperates the geniuses from the hacks is coming up with these brilliant moments – finding some story or other to cogently glue them all together is the boring part. Today our CGI effects are so advanced that most of us are impressed just to see some vaguely pretty thing float across the screen. The problem translates to video games, where we face a sea of identical, beautiful hyper-realistic shooters, and we have forgotten that in Contra 3 there was this bit where you were under attack from a sea of missiles, and your character JUMPS FROM MISSILE TO MISSILE up to the boss, and shoots him in the face.

I don’t care how good it looks, i only care about discussing it down the pub and getting excited all over again. My only critical criteria is; when discussing the media at hand, how many times can i say, “awww, there’s this bit where…”

Not a game

Made a few changes to the blog format today, broadened the range of topics i’ll be writing on so hopefully I’ll be more likely to actually update every day. New blog sub-title reads thus:

“New media, tech, games and Warcraft”

pretty amazing, right? I used the Aristotelean laws of tragedy combined with the golden ratio to create it. However i predict some naysaying right off the bat:

“Games and Warcraft? Warcraft is a game! i hate the new title and by extension have come to hate you!”

Warcraft is not a game. Proving this will be the subject of the first post. By doing so i shall win the day and silence the naysayers. Pray silence…

Two properties one would commonly ascribe to a video game that cannot be ascribed to WoW:

1. Blindness-inducing fun

A good game will make you go blind with fun. WoW can make no such boast, as at it’s core it is very little fun. In this sense WoW perfectly mirrors real life. Want to do something cool in WoW? A sexy new mount, awesome new axe? Well get ready for several weeks of arduous repetitive labour, earning the money/reputation/experience to attain said item. and that’s ok – the hard graft makes the eventual achievement all the more rewarding, but let’s just say that WoW is a game in as much as a flight-simulator, which makes you fly the English channel in realtime before you get to crash into the Eiffel Tower.

2. Escapism

Regular games provide blissful escape from the drudgery of everyday life. Can the same be said of Warcraft? Not likely. Despite being first and foremost a fantasy game the nature of putting a fantastical realm into a realtime universe which is populated by real people imposes some strict limitations. For example:

I have to earn gold. the process is slow and laborious. I have to work for it and there are no shortcuts. the best way to make money is to create items yourself and selling them over the in-game auction house at a small profit to people with enough money that they can afford to simply buy, instead of make, what they want.

Training a profession is expensive, and gives you no edge over the market as everyone else has the same skills as you.

Getting hired for a raid or dungeon is as tricky as landing a job. Prepare to face interviews from pinickety group leaders who will ask for, and be dissappointed with, your character stats, dps,  armor, resilience rating and HP. They will also want to know what you have trained as, your class and sub-class specification and will make very sure you know what your role is within the team. Yesterday I tried to exaggerate my characters stats only to have the raid leader look up my character online (on WoW armory, the web-based statistic repository) and foil my efforts. Alas he saw i was wearing mostly blue items (of piddling rare quality) and he wanted only people decked out in purple items (of glorious epic quality) so no work for me. If you are lucky enough to qualify for a dungeon or raid group, make sure you are polite and do your job diligently and ethically – you are only two clicks away from being unceremoniously booted out.

I don’t know what to draw from these observations. Possibly that the market economy system is embedded deep in human nature, or perhaps that there’s a subconscious post-modern giggling-into-the-milk type thrill to be had from seeing a blood-elf paladin paying his taxes.