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.

First Floridian impressions

OK so i’m here in Florida for two weeks, hanging out with Michael Mouse and his friends, and i thought that a good way to force myself awake for another hour (to help with the jetlag) would be to list my observations over the last two days of tech from across the pond.

First thing to note – very similar prices. Thats a pretty dull observation though. Sorry. Swifty moving on:

A lot of emphasis on mobile (cellular) phones. Apparently this is because the country is so huge loss of signal is a big issue. Hence AT&T pushing sales on the strength of their coverage. Seems very odd to me, but i’m sure i take coverage completely for granted having not lost it for about seven years. My phone is handling the country fine, but can’t decide between cingular and T-mobile.

Lots of tech on TV. Many, many ads for specific products, for retailers, even for software! Saw one that was for a diagnostics website. They would tell you if your pc should be running faster than it is. There were a lot of happy people glad that their PCs were “fast, at last!”

Total failure to be amazed at my new Asus eee pc 901, upon which i am writing this post. It’s beautiful, has amazing battery life and my model runs Linux. (though it’s available with XP) Running Linux is proving to be quite an adventure, i’m terrible at it, but i wont learn if i don’t push myself! and running Linux on such a low-spec machine would really be helpful, after all i want this netbook to be ultraportable, long lasting and featuring only Word (or equivalent staroffice8) and Firefox. Installing firefox 3 (or anything) onto the OS is pretty tortuous for now, as i am still a Linux n00b, but give me time.

In any case, so far America has been pretty unimpressed with my new favourite piece of technology. I mean, fair enough i haven’t taken it out the house, or shown it to a single american, but strangely enough i still manage to feel morally outraged.

This certainly says more about me that it does about America however.

MacBook Air

Today we will discuss the MacBook Air.

The best way in my opinion to judge a product is to look at its advertising. this tells us who wants one, and why – both very useful in assessing a product. Therefore let us travel by internet to the Apple website, more specifically, the MacBook Air page.

“Thinnovation.” Hm. Not a great start. Apple come under a lot of fire for making trendy but technically impotent laptops. How will they combat this criticism?

“MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else.”

well that’s a relief because my last laptop was actually frighteningly similar to other laptops – it had more than one USB socket for one thing, and a big ugly CD/DVD drive, not to mention two unwieldy hard-drives. In fact it had so many features it could easily have fatally pinned me under its massive weight as i sat typing in the park. The last thing i would see would be MacBook Air users playing frisbee with their laptops, and laughing with their beautiful wives.

Eagle-eyed readers will have guessed by now that this is not an unbiased review. The MacBook air really, really gets my proverbial goat. And here’s why; it’s the bare-faced implication that other laptop manufacturers are making their laptops thicker and heavier on purpose. As if the conversation at Dell headquarters goes something like this:

“Well sir we’ve managed to fit in all the features we think our customers need.”
“Good. now let’s stick on a few pounds of superfluous plastic and get this wagon rolling!”

Laptops aren’t fat and heavy because Sony think we could lose a few pounds lugging them around. It’s because they are full, packed, loaded with weighty computer parts! All the components, circuitry and wires that make your computer a machine capable of doing some damn computing. Apple (and you can’t hate them for it, they’re geniuses really) have spotted that if you take out all those heavy components and leave it with the bare minimum it needs to do some word processing and look at some pictures, then it’s a whole lot lighter! And people will pay through the nose for it! ($1,800 at the time of writing.)

Do yourselves a favour. Buy a great fat laptop capable of doing something other than typing up your big screenplay.

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We on the internet hate our comeuppance

Well, who’d have thought it would come to this.

The internet’s influence on the entertainment media is obviously huge, but never has it been felt in quite such a personal way as this. I am talking of course about the writers strike in LA. They want royalties from internet downloads, and they’re holding all our favourite shows to ransom. Now i’ve always taken the internet with a pinch of salt – there were no tears from me when Metallica killed Napster. But the prospect of no new 24, Prison Break or Family Guy in 2008 is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow.

I can see the logic – writers get nothing for download sales, which can’t be fair. Profits for these sales are pittance, but it’s about drawing a line. Five years down the line this is going to be big numbers, and unless they make a stand now they’re going to suffer later. On the other hand in ten years time we’ll all have worked out how to get our content online illegally and for free. If they’re striking over the legal stuff, who knows what’s going to go happen when it’s not only the studios but the consumers ripping them off?

This sucks. The internet used to be all fun and games, and now it might kill all my favourite shows! The internet led me to believe i could have it all – fast easy video and great programming whenever i wanted. Just another false prophet. This coupled with the TV-links fellow getting arrested, and there’s only one conclusion to be reached…

 The internet is serious business.

Radiohead sales figures come to light

In early October Radiohead released their latest album ‘In Rainbows’ online, with the added benefit to fans of being able to pay whatever they thought was reasonable for the download. Well initial stats are beginning to trickle in and the results are surprising. Wired report the average amount paid was somewhere between £2.50 and £4, whilst yahoo report 62% of purchasers chose to pay the minimum amount. I offer up two interpretations on my humble platter.

Interpretation 1:

The British public are penny pinching thieves who, granted anonymity would steal from their own children, and those who paid anything over the minimum did so only because Thom Yorke’s lazy eye makes them nervous.

Interpretation 2:

The figures reflect the fact that people are sick of paying as much as they have had to for music – especially the ones savvy enough to download it who will doubtless know how to get it for free elsewhere.

What do we think, O blogosphere?

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