For Real?

A Crocodile Dundee Moment

2011-07-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

News International have been hacked.

Some might say that it was only a matter of time, and possibly timing, because Lulzsec hacked The Sun website. It's a "That's not a knife..." moment. According to claims made by Lulz, who were reported to have disbanded, they not only replaced the website's main page and later diverted it to their twitter feed, they also have emails. Lots of emails. Which they may choose to release.

News International are in so much of a mess right now - what with the arrest, the possibilities that James and Rupert might be asked to step away from the corporation, the possible FBI investigation in the USA and perhaps whispers of one in Australia too- that this hack might well be their smallest concern right now.

On the other hand, they have rather poked the internet with a stick.

In the US, Fox has apparently been playing up the angle that one little incident of less than moral journalists listening to voicemail is not as bad as, say, the cyber record of China. True, that. On the other hand, the PRC is doing what every other nation state is doing: conducting espionage operations against powers and states who threaten their interests. It's only scary because we don't understand it. So let's have a little perspective.

If people from outside the USA hack the Pentagon and steal information, it's almost exactly the same as if they had turned a member of the defense department and got that person to steal and sell secrets. The scary part of it is that they used technology and didn't need to get anywhere near the Pentagon. Of course, the CIA and the NSA have been conducting operations against enemies of the USA. It's a safe bet that these operations have always been going on, and we never get to hear about them. It's National Security, and even if you believe fervently that no one should be doing this sort of thing at all, you can understand why they don't tell you it's going on.

The good news is that the cyberspies of China, or North Korea, or Iran, don't give a tinker's cuss about you. You, as an individual, are not interesting to them. They do not need to go grubbing about in your email for salacious details of your private life.

News International, on the other hand, might. All that needs to happen for News International to invade your privacy is for you to be involved in a 'news' story. Even peripherally. What sort of stories? Let's compare front pages.

The Sun

The Guardian

I could have linked to The Telegraph or The Independent and you'd have seen different approaches to much the same story. The thing is, while News International might have fancied a rummage around in your hard drive or your voicemail, the broadsheet papers aren't interested in you either.

The larger story remains, and will likely get lost in the kerfuffle.

The Murdoch papers and media empire have set themselves up as Kingmakers. All of a sudden, we are aware that politicians owe this company favours...not minor politicians, the actual Prime Minister of the UK is effectively in the Murdoch pocket. The price for delivering assistance in securing an election victory was a Downing Street blessing over News International owning BSkyb and increasing pressure on the BBC.

It seems strange that one can talk about an organisation that is effectively a state broadcaster, set up by Royal Commission, as being a bastion of freedom of speech. But in the last decade, as the power of News International grew, that's what the BBC effectively came to represent.

Having lived in the USA and spent some time around Fox News broadcasts (and the assorted Talk Radio broadcasters), I came to value the surprisingly even handed approach of the BBC. Yes, it leans to the left. It leans to the left like a learner biker on his first attempt at a roundabout. Which is to say "not very hard". But, and this is important, you know it's there. The BBC has often been critical of whichever government is in power, because it's had the access to ask questions of those in Downing Street. Obviously, no sitting government likes that and both Labour and the Conservatives have taken issue with things the Beeb has said.

They've been able to because there are ways to take the BBC to task. But up until very recently, there was no effective way to do the same to News International.

There may not be. It depends what the outcome of all this turns out to be. But it's important we not take our eyes off this story, because it's about one organisation's attempts to own significant parts of the English speaking world's media.

Begun, the media snark has

2011-07-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

The News of the World is dead, and no sooner has it gone than The Sun believes it has identified the foul conspirators who sealed the doom of this bastion of journalistic integrity and honour.

It's blaming the BBC, the Guardian and a smattering of others. But mostly the BBC and the Guardian.

It's worth remembering that the reason the BBC is roundly loathed by some of the press is because the BBC is a public service broadcaster and a major news outlet. It also makes some rather excellent television programmes. But mostly the reason News International and the Daily Mail hate the BBC is the news output.

There's quite a lot more. I've linked to one item from Paul Mason, which explains something about why this whole story is a lot more interesting than just an expose of shoddy journalism.

He notes that the broadcast media in the UK - notably BBC News, ITN News and even Sky News (which is part of BSkyb, the organisation that News International has bits of and wants to buy outright) have all played a part in keeping the whole mess in the public eye.

The Sun is attempting to remind people that the BBC is funded by the Licence Fee and that 'fat cats' waste public money. If you want to know how that money is spent, click here. A News International publication is attempting to motivate it's readers to feel incensed that the BBC could participate in taking out a rival.

Of course, now that people are aware that News International wasn't beyond lawbreaking and bribing police, they're looking at how other News International publications have behaved, and there's the possibility that they may have played less than fair.

Some of the questions this issue asks are huge.

How far can the press go in finding information to substantiate stories?

Should the freedom of the press be limited by government?

What is the Public Interest?

Should one organisation ever be allowed to become so powerful that it is capable of manufacturing consent?

How comfortable are we with our politicians owing favours to companies or organisations that do not represent the population as a whole? - because let's not forget that although Dave Cameron is most likely in hock to Murdock, generations of Labour politicians ad close ties to the Trade Union movement and it's alleged that Ed Milliband still does. Is that actually OK?

It's all worth thinking about, in an assortment of serious and careful ways. Because however nice it is to see "your side" win one, this story is more than just two media organisations going to Handbags at Dawn...it actually affects how the last election was fought, how much power people are allowed to have and how this country is run. It's like lifting up a stone to catch a glimpse of what scuttles away.

Hacked Hacks Pack!

2011-07-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

A sort of follow up, which is only appropriate since this is only a sort of blog.

The News of the World is closing and going away for ever. Or at least until The Sun on Sunday (or perhaps just Sun-day) starts up.

Apparently, people as annoyed about their casual use of phone phreakery and hackery mounted a small campaign using social media to raise awareness of how much distrust there is in the News of the World. Advertisers pulled ads from the paper. And Rupert Murdoch is closing it down.

Is this good news?

Not as such.

Rupert Murdoch still wants to own Sky. He still wants to dismember the BBC and he still wants to do all this with the permission of the Conservative government, who owe him big time for the election victory Murdoch's UK papers and media outlets helped them achieve.

We have to remember it wasn't all Murdoch. Labour failed magnificently to be a political party that anyone could actually vote for, but nevertheless, Murdoch's price is all about making him the sole player in the UK's media.

This all gets a bit murky, because although I love the BBC and although I believe that Mr. Murdoch's ambitions are basically incompatible with civilisation, I am forced to admit that he's a very successful businessman and he's where he is for a reason.

Having given the Devil his due... I am glad to see the back of NotW, and I am hoping to see an investigation which uncovers exactly how much we can trust News International. I doubt we'll get that, but we can hope.

I was about to launch into a rant about business, education and art. Again. I still believe that business needs to **** off out of education and we, as a nation and as a civilisation, need to pay more attention to the arts in general.

It occurred to me today that I can't remember the names of any businessmen from a hundred years ago. I remember, dimly, the names of the men who we hold responsible for the industrial revolution, and I remember the names of scientists and artists. In fact, I can remember the names of artists all the way back to the ancient greeks.

I just can't name and businessmen.

I doubt that in a hundred years time we will remember who Lord Sugar is. I doubt that we will really remember who Murdoch is, especially since the name Hearst is now fading from popular memory - even though he's linked to Citizen Kane. I don't think any of the entrepreneurs and businessfolks are ever going to be remembered and it will not matter what they said or did.

We'll remember the artists, though. I have a feeling that names like Pratchett will carry on. I have a feeling that in a century people will still know who Truffaut or Spielberg or Scorsese were. There are bound to be artists like Damian Hurst who get remembered. I think our descendants will still know about Elvis and The Beatles, perhaps even Take That.

But the names of the businessmen are dust on the wind, perhaps because deep down we really don't care what they do.

Who Hacks the Hacks?

2011-06-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

If you pay attention to news about the internet, and about security, you may be aware of two groups:

Anonymous

and

Lulzsec

Both have recently had members arrested by law enforcement after attacks on high profile targets.

In the case of Lulzsec, The Sun have pitched in. A chap by the name of Ryan Clearly got himself arrested, having been identified variously as a "criminal mastermind" - largely by the red top press. The Sun proceed to do a hatchet job on the lad, who currently has quite a lot to be miserable about.

The Sun says that Lulzsec have been involved in hitting targets that were supposed to have been secure and security conscious. Like Sony, who lost several million sets of customer details. They have also struck at law enforcement. The point is, you are supposed to trust these companies and organisations. Lulzsec have been attempting to demonstrate that this trust may be misplaced.

Ryan has been given a thorough slating by The Sun. They have sought to depict him as some kind of consistently dazed idiot, and therefore as harmless. They are suggesting that we have nothing to fear from hackers like Ryan, because a hapless teenager cannot possibly be a threat and should not be taken seriously.

It's not a bad point. Ryan's current claim to fame is that he's all over the Sun news paper for inhaling lighter fuel, which is one of the dumber ways to make yourself feel good that I've ever heard of. He's clearly an idiot. The Guardian, however, shows what Lulzsec have been up to.

It's a scarier read, which one would expect from a newspaper for grownups.

So why minimize Ryan? A boy who was only caught because he made the mistake of counting coup on the wrong people, since it appears he may have been turned in by members of the hacker community (who allegedly posted his contact details online). The Police claim that the arrest is significant, and you can bet they will be using whatever means they can to extract names and locations of other lulzsec members in the hope that the hacking group will collapse. Since it took law enforcement a day or so to get the SOCA website back up, you can see why they might be giving this matter a lot of attention.

However...admitting that Ryan might actually be dangerous (see how the article says he would sit in his room, a room that contains two (!!) computers, when other normal people were smoking spliffs, as if the use of a computer is what makes him a freak) would mean admitting that other members of lulzsec have power, and may also be kids. If kids are able to take the best efforts of adult professionals and kick them over or break them down, we have to admit that these people have power on a similar level to an agency or government.

There are things to keep in mind. Firstly, Ryan got caught because he was an ass.

The same is true of the recent Anon. arrests - Spanish authorities picked up some kids who had downloaded, installed and deployed Anon's favourite DoS weapon, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. And they had done so without the proper understanding of how to effectively cover their tracks. These were not hackers, these were Scriptkiddies who saw some instructions on 4Chan and decided, in the way that kids do, to do something stupid because it was cool or funny at the time.

The people who organize and who do the real hacking will take a much more concerted effort to catch, if they are caught at all.

Be that as it may, you might remember that The Sun is a News International newspaper. It's owned by Murdoch, who also owns The News of the World. The News of the World was recently in the press because of a phone hacking scandal.

Now, at the time I seem to remember NoTW hacks claiming that the information they had illegally accessed was in the public interest.

Does this mean that hacking is OK when you're a News International "journalist", but not if you're a teenager?

Speaking entirely personally, while it's difficult to condone the actions of Lulzsec it is important that we recongnise the service they perform. Our institutions do not take IT security seriously. DoS attacks are survivable and certainly should be one of the easier forms of attack to deal with. A high profile organisation, particularly one that is involved in government work or Regnum Defende, needs to be better at this. Particularly given what China is alleged to have been up to.

Shakespeare in Klingon

2011-06-14T14:27:00.000-07:00

Look at this: Soliloquy in Klingon. What's wrong with that? In it's own terms, nothing. It's a good performance and actually it's interesting to see that a decent actor and Shakespeare's lines can still have meaning in an artificial language.

Mind you, Ken Campbell knew that when he translated The Scottish Play into pidgin. There's a review here. Nope, it's not the language or the performance that make the To Be Or Not To Be speech out of place in Klingon. It's the choice of play.

Hamlet is far too...wet...to be a Klingon. Had Hamlet been a Klingon, the play would be one act long, that act consisting of the message from the ghost of Hamlet's father and then a brutal fight scene ending with Claudius bifurcated and a dying Hamlet giving Fortinbras a solid kicking too.

The whole 'Hamlet in Klingon' thing comes from the Star Trek movie The Undiscovered Country, in which a Klingon character insists that one can best understand Shakespeare only in the original Klingon.

Fair enough. Bill's got the same haircut and exposed forehead as a Klingon, and Bill has a talent for writing stirring pre-battle speeches.

However, to see how a Klingon really should handle Shakespeare we might as well turn to a master of the art. Here's Sir Ian doing the opening bit to Richard III.

It is possibly the most badass introduction to a character that Shakespeare ever gives. Within the space of one speech you know everything about Richard that you will ever need to know, and you come to respect his intelligence and his cunning all at the same time. You know that Richard is a soldier first and foremost, too, which should make him appealing to Klingons.

Doctor Who?

2011-06-02T15:40:00.000-07:00

Over at Den of Geek, which is one of those pro-bloggy sites which I can't seem to stop reading and would probably quite enjoy working for, I found a thought provoking article about Doctor Who.

It's here, and it's a critique of New Doctor Who. I enjoyed reading it, I also enjoyed disagreeing with it on a couple of points. Rather than attempt a fannish evisceration of the article - where would the point be? The writer isn't wrong - I thought I'd put together a counter argument.

The darkest days of Doctor Who came in the 1980s. As a fan, it was one of the staples of my life. I would ritually settle down in front of a title sequence that I was getting less and less happy with (the one I grew up with is probably still my favourite), listen to the theme music that had drifted away from the spine chilling electronica that to this day I can't get out of my head, and try to pretend that it hadn't all gone a bit wrong.

In the 1980s, Doctor Who was being torn in about three different directions at once. Some of the writers and script editors wanted the show to be a bit more grown up. Some of the fans did too, because by this point it had been on for something like twenty years. The kids who had been introduced to the Doctor in a Totters Lane junkyard now had families of their own, who were seriously unimpressed with the low budget, effects-poor fare that compared rather unfavorably to TV shows from across the Atlantic, and those parents now wanted a show which reflected their changing priorities.

The BBC didn't want the show at all.

The Producer wanted to try for some popularity. John Nathan Turner is often lambasted for his time on Doctor Who, and very unfairly so, given that without him the show wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. His decisions on guest stars, and on some of the directions the show would take, have made him a byword for all that fans thought was wrong with Doctor Who at the time.

What really happened was this: Doctor Who was in no position to move with the times. The BBC didn't want to spend time and money looking at the programme and the format. They had no interest in giving it the budget it needed to look as though it was punching at the same weight as the competition.

All of these things aside, us fans got something close to what we wanted with Sylvester McCoy's last two seasons. We got what appeared to be final stories for the Daleks and the Cybermen. We got a Doctor who started out a clown and became something very much more complex. And then the whole thing got handed off to Virgin Publishing, where a series of 7th Doctor novels would show what Doctor Who was capable of.

I read them. I think I read all but a couple. Some of them were brilliant. Others, not. They all had one thing in common: they were not suitable for children.

The show as it stands now is back with its roots. It is a TV show you can sit a 12 year old down with (or a bright younger child) and be reasonably assured that they will be entertained and that their imagination will be fired. This is what Doctor Who did for me, it's what Doctor Who does best and it's what Doctor Who is busily engaged in.

Aspects have moved on. The kids that started watching in 2005 are now six years older. Some of them will be turning 12. Some will be turning 18. To keep those viewers interested, stuff changes a little. But not much, and certainly not enough to - for example - alienate the new generation of viewers.

Doctor Who can be dark, because fairy stories are dark, and scary because a lot of children's tales are scary. It can be quite callous and hard, if it wants to, because children aren't the lovely bundles of fluff that some parents have decided they should be. Are you kidding? Listen to children playing some time. Children are so empathy-challenged that you can sit them in front of the Disney Channel for 12 hours - an experience that would make even the most ardent BNP supporter want to investigate how good it can be to share things with people who aren't like us - and they will still be selfish, capricious little shits at the end of it.

The call, by some older fans, to make Doctor Who grow up and be something different is never going to be heeded. To survive, the show needs to recruit new viewers and - paradoxically for a show that completely changes every couple of years - it needs constants.

In his article, Mark Reed said that the show suffered from a poverty of vision and that it could be so much more than 50 minutes of fast-paced lightweight scifi. It could be something like The Wire.

It could. And that would mean it stopped being Doctor Who.

Things do change. Companions come and go, there's continuity (of a sort) over years...decades, even... and the style of the show changes. Watch something from the first year of Doctor Who, then have a look at the Patrick Troughton story The Invasion. Then watch something like The Silurians. Treat yourself to Talons of Weng Chiang, and then watch Frontios. It's a completely different style of show, and yet exactly the same. Like the Doctor himself.

The thing that keeps us coming back to the show is not a desire for it to be as dense or complex as The Wire. It's different for all of is fans, but it hinges on the show saying something important to us when we were younger and continuing to say it today.

The Moffat Era is still talking to me, and although I really would like a network and a writer to take a science fiction idea and do with it what was done to The Wire, or The West Wing, I don't believe Doctor Who is the show to do it with.

Perhaps the new incarnation of Torchwood might have what people are looking for. It's a TV show for adults.

Hands in pockets, mooching about

2011-05-27T14:43:00.000-07:00

It's been a rough week.

Not particularly rough for me, you understand, because my problems are few, but for at least one friend.

So, happy thoughts towards him.

Anyway. Books.

I thought I'd made a serious mistake because having decided to do this NatNoWriMo thing, I've realised I have no plot, no characters and no setting.

Except I think I have them now.

Of course, this leads me to talk of naming spaceships.

If you look back over the best loved spaceships, you end up thinking about Star Trek. You might recall Lost in Space but you probably won't recall the name of their ship. Odds are, though, that you know the USS Enterprise. So any book that features a space ship has to give that ship a memorable name. It has to feel right. It has to have weight, and purpose.

All the parody names that people have come up with don't quite work. Even the Protector from Galaxy Quest doesn't really have "it". Galactica does, at least these days, and that's mostly thanks to the re-imagined BSG which gave the ship the dignity it never had in the original series. It's even got more cultural weight than TARDIS, which has entered the English language to mean any space which is deceptively roomy.

So, if you want to give a starship a name, it has to have a unique something.

I think the Nostromo has it,but it's pinched from a Conrad novel and that seems to help.

Inevitably, Wikipedia has a list of fictional space ships and most of the names are rather...naff. Compared with some of the names the Royal Navy used for cruisers and battleships (come on! who doesn't love the name Warspite?) they seem rather dull and thoughtless.

So, loads of source material for all this stuff, and loads of words to play with.

2011-05-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

So, having decided to do this novel writing thing it seems like I ought to actually have an idea.

I've got a couple of months to research, which gives me ample time to figure out what I want to do and then do whatever reading I want to do in order to lend whatever plot I come up with some kind of believability.

On the one hand, part of me wants to write a fantasy book. It's not that they're easy, or that they have particular challenges that I relish, it's just that I have never really written anything like that before.

I've also set myself a specific challenge. No fan fic, None. So whatever I come up with must be an original idea and use original characters. No short cuts.

I already realise that I'm going to regret this. Surely a first novel written under pressure should be easier on the writer than this?

I don't think I want that at all. In one sense, this is a test of whether or not I can hack it as a writer and a novelist. This is the dream I have had since I was a kid, and perhaps after November that's going to be a dream I will know I can make true, or not. In that light, it has to be done right. Everyone has at least one book in them.

Plot. Character. Tension, opposition and antagonists. And an ending. I suck at endings.

Speaking of which, I've got to present a five minute 'thing' on the journey of faith next Sunday. Why do I agree to these things?

Novelist

2011-05-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

I decided to sign up for National Novel Writing Month.

In November, I am going to spend my month turning out at least 30,000 words of story. Following that, I am going to edit and re-write what I come up with in an attempt to actually sell a novel.

If that fails, I will do it again the following year and use the time in between to learn about how to edit, re-write and market a book.

Why?

Because I want to at least try.

In the mean time, I plan to finish the short stories I have rattling around in my head.

Edit\: fifty thousand words. Oh.

Fifty thousand.

OK. That's...one thousand six hundred and sixty six point six recurring words a day.

I can still do that. Totally.

I should do this more often

2011-05-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

I don't like people very much.

That's not true really. People are generally amazing and I enjoy their company.

What I despair of is ever getting anything done that involves more than three of them.

Here's a simple thing: at work, a couple of m'colleagues wanted to join a book club. They like reading, so why not? Why not indeed.

Being a practical sort, I suggested they form their own.

The easy way to start a club or group or anything is to get people to show up in one spot and do whatever it is they came to do. You are, for the most part, organizing a pissup in a brewery.

So I thought we could just get together in a Starbucks and talk about books.

Since that point, everyone who has become involved has wanted to modify what should be a simple exercise and we are now at the point where I'm thoroughly exasperated. It's my own fault, I'm trying to be accommodating. What I should be saying to specific people is:

"You know, it's great you want to be involved and everything, but you can quit trying to ruin a good idea now. The fact is, the potential for this event has always existed but not once in the preceding months did you have the wit to arrange it. So fuck off, you're wrong."

In future, I will keep my ideas small and quiet until they are well established.

In happier news, I was delighted to see Google Music in Beta.

It bravely announced that it would allow me to send all my music, from whatever device it was stored on, to the Cloud and access it from anywhere!

Neat!

Plus, knowing Google, it'd be free.

I noticed this at work, and came home with the intention of telling Spotify that it was all over between us. I fired up Spotify and, lo and behold, it proceeded to catalog all of my offline music and make it available in a Cloud, so I can access it on my mobile - which is an HTC Desire Z droid phone - and any other device.

I might still bin Spotify, because money is getting tight and the monthly subscription to premium is looking iffy, but it's nice to see Google beaten to the punch.

Also, the ability to mooch around Spotify for new stuff is very pleasing and has kept me usefully amused for hours.

Science fiction triple feature

2011-05-12T08:40:00.001-07:00

I've been away from this blog for some time. I'll explain later.

The bad news is that I had written this post just before Blogger died for a couple of days. I know I saved the whole thing as a draft. I mean, I know I did, because I hadn't finished the post and besides that, I wanted to come back and edit it.

Well, it's gone. All of it. As they say in America, sonofabitch.

Never mind. Writing is re-writing.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

is dead. He has been dead for ten years, more or less exactly.

He died young, he left the world much poorer for his passing and it has had to struggle on without him ever since.

I did not know Douglas Adams. I think I might once have communicated with him on a forum - possibly the Digital Village - once. But that was it.

Just as well, too. The horrible teetering thing about being a fan is you might meet the person you idolize and find out they aren't the person you imagine them to be. That might be crushingly awful. Of course they might be wonderful, but people tend to be people no matter the height of esteem you hold them in.

So, the Douglas Adams I knew was constructed from his work. This is the nice thing about writers; they let you into their heads - or limited bits of their heads - and show you what they're thinking. Of course the craft of writing means this is artifice and you have to be wary of that, because this is where the whole fallacy that you know the artist comes from. It's much saner to say that I knew the work of Douglas Adams and was profoundly pleased to have discovered it.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was the place where my sense of humour lived. I damn near memorized several versions of the story. I can still bore people with quotes, although these days I very nearly have the maturity not to. To put this in context, there have been shows - The Goon Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Hancock's Half Hour - which define a sense of humour. These shows provide a home, a place where those who share that sense of humour, belong.

I came late to the Goons and Python. I was obsessing about towels long before I understood about pining for the fjords.

With typical Geek appetite, once I had discovered Douglas Adams I wanted to read everything he'd ever written and consequently discovered his love for technology and his concern for the environment. I also discovered that he wasn't a novelist at heart (but had managed to write some good ones anyway) and, essentially, wanted to be given the chance to tinker with stuff and then enthuse about it to people who had receptive minds.

I'm glad that he had the chance to do this. I'm delighted by his imagination, because things he wrote are still with us to be enjoyed, and I'm grateful to him for giving my sense of humour a place to call home.

Moffat Slams Spoilers

There's a really odd relationship between fans and spoilers.

Some of us love them. I think it's the thrill of secret knowledge. Other people love the tang of the illicit.

Like any piece of art - yes, television is art and if you disagree then sorry but you're wrong (at least for the purposes of this blog) - people form relationships with a TV show. Most of us have a pretty normal, healthy relationship with the show and are satisfied with that. Some want more. They want clandestine meetings in seedy hotels, they want to explore relationship elements which, to others, would seem transgressive.

I think that's part of the thrill of spoilers.

My own relationship with spoilers is similar to a Lovecraftian protagonist's relationship with the Mythos. Sure, I want the knowledge. Crave it, even. But I know having the knowledge will drive me mad and result in my face being bitten off by something with too many mouths.

Generally, I try to be Spoiler free.

However, for those who want to be Spoiled and who consent to be Spoiled...well, I can't really tell them they're wrong. Any sensible fan, and any sensible forum, has a special place reserved where people who want to engage in a little harmless Spoilering...can. Behind closed doors, so to speak. If you're a consenting fan, there's no harm in this.

The Moff has vilified the other type of fan. The one for whom blurting spoiler information where any unsuspecting person might see it is cruise control for cool.

I always assume this person is either looking desperately for validation, or else has a staggering lack of empathy, but either way it's a cry for help.

If Doctor Who is art, and if people form relationships with it, then the senseless spoiler is rather like the graceless idiot who sidles up to someone in the first blush of first love and, in an oleaginous whisper, says 'oh yeah...goes like a bunny, they say'.

Neil Gaiman Writes Doctor Who

I saw something in a facebook post. Someone said that the episode written by Neil Gaiman is superb - something I agree with wholeheartedly - and is much the better for the fact that it's written by someone who isn't one of The Moff's inner circle of friends.

I had a chuckle about this.

Because it's wrong.

Well, it's mostly wrong.

I don't want to comment on the relationship between Neil Gaiman and The Moff. I have no idea what it is, beyond the comments made by the men themselves on Doctor Who Confidential. I also have no desire to know. It doesn't matter.

Well, it doesn't matter beyond this: Neil Gaiman is a talented author and all round generally capable writer who wanted to write for Doctor Who and, after having met Steven Moffat, wrote to him to ask if he could.

It helps, of course, that Neil Gaiman has several novels to his name. And some screenplays. And some comics. And quite a lot of other things. Frankly, if Neil Gaiman wrote to you and said that he'd like to try writing an episode of your show, you'd be mental to dismiss the prospect out of hand.

Be that as it may, the author of the original facebook comment may have misunderstood the nature of writers and script editors. To an extent, there's a lot of social networking that goes on. It happens in every walk of life. If we're in a position to be handing out work, we will give it first to people we know and trust. These will, in all probability, be people we also find it easy to like. Before you know it, you've got yourself an inner circle of friends.

Being outside the whole process of Doctor Who, we do not see it and we do not understand it properly. My time as an amateur parapsychologist taught me that when people half see something, they will make shit up to explain what they believe is happening, and that this shit is worryingly difficult to dislodge.

We have to be really careful if we're trying to be critical, careful not to equate "this doesn't work for me" with "I totally understand how this happened, and it's a bizarre conspiracy".

Especially when we're looking at a social network which we're not a part of and which we have no chance of being a part of. It's hard to see what's really there when the shadowplay that hints at how we only think the world works is so much more comforting.

Gosh, I've really let this go, haven't I?

2010-01-21T09:19:00.000-08:00

I'm ashamed to admit that I have totally ignored this blog and the things I said I would do. Utterly.

I'm not proud of that, and I'm not offering a defence. Quite the contrary.

Instead, I have been trying to wrap my head around the search for work and building a life of sorts in Liecester. Those things, at least, are going well.

The odd thing about them is that there's nothing exciting to report. Not a thing that isn't day to day life. None of this makes for electrifying blogging, nor does it particularly inspire me to do much that is creative. On the other hand, it has been snowy and rainy and grey and grim here - as my fellow brits know only too well - and all of these things tend to make me want to curl up and read books.

I've done that a lot. Over the last couple of months, I've ploughed through about 30 novels - few of any great consequence. 26 of them were the entire Sharpe series, which are good (if undemanding) fun and it's nice to watch an author crowbar his hero into every aspect of a historical period. I have also read:

Who's Afraifd of Beowulf?
Odds and Gods
Overtime
- by Tom Holt.

and

The Lasy Colony
- by John Scalzi (it's the last part of a series that starts with Old Man's War, continues with The Ghost Brigades and is well worth a read if you fancy some unrepentant scifi).

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman's book for kids and the parents that like to read to them, which is a really good read.

The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham...because the Beeb did a new version of it over the new year.

Annyway. I am going to shuffle off into obscurity for another couple of weeks while I concentrate on finding work.

Wish me luck.

So here it is, Merry Christmas...

2009-12-20T17:18:00.002-08:00

I'm being a bit pre-emptive, I suppose, what with it not being Dec 25th yet.

Bloggy-business: the announcement of the winning definition will happen after Xmas; I haven't forgotten and there is definitely a prize afoot.

Other Business: I've been rattling around Leicester - I can recommend it - and generally being on extended holiday. All of that has to stop, alas, and I have to start taking life much more seriously now. Not that I want to, but it will be best all around if I do.

So hurrah for that.

And with that...rather pale and poor imitation of a blog post...here's a Christmas wish for the folks who read me:

My 2009 was both a high and low point, a series of triumphs and the long crawl out from under the biggest failure of my life. Now, at the death of the year, I can look forward to what 2010 will bring and be reasonably certain that the good things I did, the steps forward I took, far outnumber (if not outweigh) the bad and the backward. I can go forward, knowing that forward is the right direction and that if I only apply myself, I can do anything I set my mind to.

May your Christmas bring with it similar revelations, so that you can relax and enjoy the depth of winter with those you love, and that you emerge in spring refreshed and relaxed.

Merry Christmas, mes amis.

From the Drafty Garrett

2009-11-13T03:40:00.001-08:00

It's all new!

The laptop is new, for the portability. The internet connection is new, arrived today. The flat is new-ish, with a patina of grime that I am slowly beating back and killing off with chemical weapons. I have rediscovered Ribena, formed new hatred for the Caps Lock key and am finding my way around Leicester unaided. All is well.

The landlord I dealt with by waving money at him; it's a human interest story really, the poor chap was attempting to invest in property just before the housing bubble burst and ended up desperately needing tennants. The last lot moved in, failed to pay anything and left again, so when I showed up basically glad for anything he was only too happy to waive the usual and sensible requirements in ordewr to have a tennant who isn't likely to do a bunk.

Since moving in and scrubbing the kitchen until it screamed I have been collecting the ephemera of modern life. The electronics were an obvious choice, but I was surprised at how much more pleasant life has become since I acquired a teapot.

I am also delighting in the area. The houses around here are largely victorian, but I know that Leicester has a medieval heart and I intend to find it. I shall use this as an excellent excuse to go mooching about in museums.

Settling In

2009-11-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

In which our hero encounters unexpected difficulties and setbacks, but things work out pretty well in the end...

Setback #1 turned out to be the postal strike which delayed banking paperwork. Sympathetic as I am to the postal worker's dispute, that was seriously annoying because it left me essentially penniless and spinning my wheels for a couple of days.

Setback #2: Guarantors, the requirement for which had me thrashing around desperately, asking favours of friends and desperately searching for a way around the problem. This reminded me of a couple of things: I have a fine collection of friends, many of whom stepped forward to offer help. They are excellent people and I am indebted to them whether they could ultimately help or not. Also, there are ways around every situation; the key is in knowing when the right opportunity has arrived.

I'm looking forward to explaining this in more detail, but I move into a new flat in a week and there are another hundred and one things to do in the meantime.

So, more from the New Drafty Garret.

In Leicestershire Ego Est

2009-10-19T03:18:00.000-07:00

...which looks a lot better than "made it" as a title.

The journey was best expressed as a series of vingettes, really.

Sky Harbor
Two airport workers express an interest in my Kindle 2. We chat - or rather, they chat and I do a very geeky gush about the technology - and then one of the pair (the shorter, slightly more aggressive one) says how he's always two or three years behind the curve to get the cheaper kit and to let the format wars settle down, which is how he got his BluRay player for almost nothing. I nod, and tell him about Toshiba selling the HD-DVD format to China, and what this will mean for grey market imports. He leaves looking concerned.

PHX to LAX
I'm reading the Sharpe novels, in order. The guy sitting next to me on the plane tells me he likes the Kindle 2 and wants to know more. There is another geeky gush from me about the K2, and this time I manage to cover some of the downsides to the device too.

LAX
A heavily armed security guard stops me to ask questions about my bag. My carry-on luggage is a replica Mk7 gas mask bag from Magnoli, of the type sported by Indiana Jones in "Raiders". He likes it, but was more concerned with whether it was functional. I assure him not, and even so I don't have a WW2 vintage gas mask. (And even if I did all I would do is wander around asking "Are you my Mummy?").

LAX is HUGE! Bigger than that, in fact, and in a state of disrepair.

At the international terminal, which LAX uses as a last attempt at getting money out of visitors (ten dollars for a sammich? You have to be kidding me!), the announcements in English are made by a guy who has a "Welcome! to the woooorld of tomorrow!!!" voice. Don't know what that is? Watch the first episode of "Futurarma".

LAX to FRANKFURT
Any way you cut it, flying economy sucks.

The journey was made marginally less hideous by the following elements:
- the very pleasant german lady I sat next to. She spoke very little English, I spoke very little German, we found ways to communicate.
- assorted movies. I never thought I would be glad to see "Night in the Museum 2", or "The Proposal", but I was. I was also glad to see "My Life In Ruins" and a John Malkovich movie in which he plays a character based on The Amazing Kreskin.
- the Doctor Who soundtracks for seasons 1 to 4, parts of which made all the turbulence over Greenland entertaining rather than worrying. Somewhere out there, someone has to have had the idea of a Doctor Who thrill ride.

Frankfurt Airport
The taps in the Gents are rather more intelligent than I would like. As you approach the basin, the tap turns itself on. The flow is quite...forceful, one assumes to get the water hot enough to do any good, but immediately you place your hands anywhere near it, the tap slows the flow down and thereby avoids you spraying water over yourself and anyone standing near you.

This usefully entertained me for some minutes, which was just as well because at this point I was little more than an ambulatory fungus anyway.

I did another little demo about the Kindle whilst waiting for the near plane - Frankfurt to Birmingham - and the final flight I admit I spent in something of a daze.

Birmingham
My how efficient it all was. In baggage retrieval I couldn't change money in order to get a trolley, nor could I get my hands on any UK currency. No one seemed to know anything very much, so I yomped the length of another bloody airport looking for my next connection. Eventually I made my way to the station and got on the right train. I navigated Birmingham New Street with whole minutes to spare, whilst assorted Rail staff watched me being kicked around by my luggage.

To be fair, they'd no idea how little sleep I'd had in the last 24 hours and they had no idea how difficult everything had become.

Leicester
The hotel: cheap and cheerful, theIbis in Leicester has MDF tables with a matress slung on the top for beds. The showers have little or no water pressure, something of a disappointment to end the mighty crossing with.

Everything else, though, is fab.

It's good to be back.

Stumbling from the wreckage

2009-10-12T23:55:00.000-07:00

Wow....

OK, so I now have everything packed and tomorrow's fun is down to "everything not already in a bag is being thrown away!"

Also, I sat down and to chill out sewed a button on a pair of shorts that I might never have reason to wear again, but which are nevertheless coming with me.

It worked really well. It's bed time.

So much for the cunning plan.

2009-10-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

There's an art to packing and moving.

Basically, it involves planning out what you need to to and breaking everything down into small stages. Ideally, you'd take a room a day and pace yourself, making sure that everything had a place and that you carefully considered what needed to be where. Then nothing would be a rush and everything would have a place. There would be no last minute panics, no frantic rushes.

It's a good plan, and it would probably have worked, except that having made my plan I then ignored it.

Never do this.

So now I'm panicking a bit. Not much, because I have a whole day tomorrow for things to happen in, so it's not too bad. Yet. But because I am now blogging instead of working I think I might be in a bit of denial about what needs to happen next.

I thought blogging this might be a nice little break while I rally the troops once more to have another crack at sorting out the bedroom and living room - which, really are the two remaining places to deal with.

I fly on Wednesday. That's the day after tomorrow, and tomorrow all my stuff goes away (yikes) and the stuff that isn't going away or coming with me is garbage. There's quite a lot of it, and it is mostly actual garbage. Why have I kept so many boxes? What was the attraction in hording all these plastic bags? Whatever the reason, I think they're becoming packing material and that works quite well. I have some fragile stuff to carry with me.

The other big issue is: 50lbs per bag. It's not really very much, is it? I worry that I might have to shed some items, although to be fair I have tried to send the heavy stuff on ahead. There are issues, though, and these I have to resolve tonight.

Now, in fact.

Which is why I'm here at the keyboard, using writing as an excuse to not deal with real life much as I sometimes use real life as an excuse not to deal with writing.

Ah well. Back to work. I shall blog at you once more from England.

Keeping the Faith

2009-10-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

America is becoming increasingly Godless, says Glenn Beck, and this is the cause of everything bad!

For those of you who don't know...Glenn Beck is a former standup comedian turned conservative talking head. He, as you can see, is on the Fox network.

Early in the piece he makes several claims.

1: ten commandments at a court house

2: Can't pray in school

3: Can't sing Christmas carols in this country.

Oh and the national motto "In God we trust" is being taken off the currency.

I'll let Snopes take the currency issue.

One of the things about the USA is that it doesn't have, or sanction, a national or state religion. Quite a few Christians wish this were otherwise, although they're still very much in the minority.
The USA doesn't have a state religion because it was founded on principles of religious freedom. The state is entirely separate from the church (or churches), as in France.

To a Brit like me, this seems a little odd. When I grew up, there were daily faith based assemblies in school and we sang hymns. We also sang a lot of groovy christmas carols at Christmas. None of this prevented me from growing up Agnostic, but at least I got to enjoy all the religious flummery that goes along with holidays like Easter and Christmas. At least I understood what those holidays were for. Kids in the USA do too, although they also associate nearly everything with the acquisition of cards and sweets. Commercialized? Why yes! Certainly!

That aside, the reasons that kids don't say prayers in school is because the schools in which they may not pray are State schools. They are funded by a government which is constitutionally unable to pick religious sides. The First Amendment to the Constitution says

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

So schools either represent all faiths or none. Which is great, really. How hard would it be to get into a multi-faith based system that represented all the major religions?

Well, except that the USA cannot prohibit the free exercise of any faith. Which means that any faith based assembly is going on for a while and will contain some startlingly contradictory elements; it's got to represent the assorted schismatic factions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism...the list is endless. And you just know that the Scientologists would want equal representation, as would the Pastafarians and possibly some of my own nearly-beloved Discordians. Also, what would be wrong with Rastafarians wanting in on the deal? Or Satanists? Or the members of the Reformed Cult of the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth? Or even Cthulhu cultists?

No, that way lies madness. So, no prayers in school.

As for the singing of Christmas carols, well, people are at liberty to do so. Just not in schools. There are some commercial groups - like Wal Mart - who would prefer to not alienate their non-Christian customers at Christian festival times (because Wal-Mart is a tool of Mammon, when you get down to brass tacks, and doesn't care what's happening to your immortal soul as long as it can have your cash in the here and now, and it knows that infidels of all kinds have money).

Of course, this could all be taken care of if the President was also a Defender of the Faith (and no, Charles, you can't be defender of the faiths, you get the title from Henry VIII who was named it by a Pope and didn't give it back after he broke from the Church). The President could pick one of the countless flavours of Christianity.

They really are without number, especially as it turns out that Baptists regard each and every church building as a separate little faith-ette. Which is quite scary. Or they just have a healthy respect for swimming and wet t-shirts. Who can say?

I would count them, but it gets confusing after you've hit the big ones (Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Unitarians, Latter Day Saints, Menonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, Methodists) and you soon get lost trying to work out which ones regard the others as Christian and which don't. Apparently the Baptists still think that the Catholics aren't Christian because they "worship Mary".

IN the light of all this, is it any wonder that the Founders of the nation took a look at the state of religion in their time (and I suspect that Thomas Jefferson may have sneaked a peak into the future as well), and decided that if you wanted all the colours of the rainbow to be seen equally, you had to make sure there was no chance of one being allowed to drown the others out.

Hence this nation being Godless, apparently. But given the number of churches, temples and places of worship I pass on a daily basis, I can't help but think that there are more gods here than anywhere else in the world.

Artists? Making money? That'll never catch on!

2009-09-29T21:34:00.001-07:00

Amanda Palmer says something important which I cannot find fault with. Go, read her blog.

Back so soon?

OK. So my position is that I'm not a consumer. Consumers are what corporations wish we were - passive, dull, happy to accept the next thing on the production line. This attitude has got them into trouble, because while the customers were changing the suppliers were not and all of a sudden it turns out that maybe we've been giving the wrong people the money.

In times past, a good artist could find themselves a rich person to glom onto. Said rich person wanted to be seen to be wealthy and what better way of demonstrating your ridiculous levels of disposable wealth than by supporting an artist? These people were referred to as Patrons. "Oh," they would say "he/she is such a patron of the arts!" and they would fan themselves. Or something.

The point is, we're actually all in a position to be able to do that. To an extent. I'd like nothing more than to be able to amble up to...ooo.. Charles Stross and say "What ho, Charles, here's thirty large. Sequester yourself away in yon drafty garret and turn out another of your excellent scientific romances."

I can't, much to my (and Charles Stross's) disappointment. What I can do, and what Amanda Palmer is suggesting I do, is give money directly to the artist. It's a world idea, really. Instead of saying "I do like the latest song, Ms Palmer, and have bought your CD! Here, enjoy this fraction of what I gave a record company" I can just hand her the entire five, ten, twenty bucks...or perhaps a smaller amount for just the one song as a download.

Why do I like this? Two reasons.

1: I don't like supporting the maniacs who currently run the music, movie and games industries*. I don't like giving Those People money because they think I'm a criminal scuzzbucket moron who they're happy to treat like dirt that they own. This is a misconception I wish to clear up. So if I can circumvent them, I will.

2: Enlightened Self Interest. This year it has become very obvious that writing is what I enjoy most. I want to be able to stop doing awful jobs and become a writer. If I can do that by producing things people like and might actually pay me to own/read etc, then what I want to do is make it really easy for them to support me.

So how about it? I think she's right. Does anyone disagree?

*I will support publishing because I'm addicted to books, I can't help myself. The other day I was shopping for a power adapter and accidentally bought a book at the same time. I'm a reader, I'm hopelessly hooked. I have a Kindle 2, 300 books on that (give or take) and it's just not enough! God help me if I ever own a house again.

I quit!

2009-09-28T21:27:00.000-07:00

...my job, at least.

I've got two weeks at my current employment and then I'm taking flight, literally.

I can't wait to quit. Much as I like the people I work with - most of them, anyway - I've had about enough of the company itself. There have been some interesting reactions.

Overwhelmingly, the people I have told have been glad for me. Two have said they'll be sad to see me go, but just about everyone else is making the best of a bad job in a company they aren't particularly happy to be working for. The reason they're staying? Again, overwhelmingly, it's because there's nothing better to go to.

This is actually a little sad. There are some nice, talented people at the place where I work and some of them deserve a bit better (or a lot better) than they're getting. I suppose it all depends on what they are willing to risk in order to better themselves, and what the price for failure might be. For a lot of my colleagues, the price of failure would be too high, and that's to be regretted. I hope things improve for them and opportunities arise for them to leave too.

Series Cancellations, TV Conservatism and The BBC

2009-09-27T20:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm returning to a current bugbear. The thing is, many folks in the UK have no idea what they would be letting themselves in for if the UK's television landscape became like the USA's.

A quick reminder of How Things Are in the land of the free: Television programs exist to create a reason for you to watch adverts. Their primary purpose is to sell advertising space. This is how the networks make most of their money. A TV show that doesn't get an audience is taking up valuable space which could be better used by a TV show that people actually watch.

It's not about art. It's not about good. It's about "watched".

Our case in point is the ABC series Defying Gravity. This was a brave attempt to write some interesting sci-fi coupled with the proven-popular mechanics of relationships and angst as seen on Gray's Anatomy. Add to this the now-popular "every episode contains flashbacks" thing, as popularized by Lost and we have a patent way to get to know the characters and their inter-relationships while we advance the plot.

The plot is a goodie: after a tragic Mars mission, NASA decides to take a Grand Tour of the solar system. In flashback, we follow the crew of the ship through training and selection. In "realtime" we follow the progress of the mission and the challenges they face. The production design is nice - very "20 minutes into the future" - and the characters are engaging and interesting. They're all sympathetic to a greater or lesser degree, so the ensemble cast works really well, and we have only one real standout villain - the control freak Mission Director back on Earth.

We also have a problem: a mysterious entity known only as "Beta" is with the crew. We know it's alien and very powerful, but nothing else. In Episode 8, after all hell has broken loose, Beta decides to reveal itself to the crew. They stand in front of an open door - some are awestruck, some disquieted, and one is wondering what the hell is going on...and we only have to wait a week to find out for ourselves.

Except that episode 8 is the last we will ever see on broadcast TV. The show was quietly - and I had to Google "defying gravity cancelled" in order to find the news - canceled with the remainder of the 13 episodes to be seen. They won't be broadcast, so when ABC releases the DVD we can buy them and watch them that way.

I was watching the show on the Hulu website, since I don't have a TV, and was therefore contributing to the ratings. However, the show is gone. The stated reason for the cancellation was that the show was "having trouble finding an audience". This means that the ratings were not where they needed to be in order for the show to be worth broadcasting. Not that it failed, or was bad, but it just didn't get watched by enough people. It may not have been watched by enough people as it was shown, so they might not have included the online viewers. I don't have the figures, so I don't know.

However, it's my case in point: in a commercial environment the success and failure of a TV show, the drivers for every decision made about it, are economic. Let's use a more familiar example: Doctor Who would have been canceled in 1963 after the first story: BBC Execs were not happy with the show, it seemed to be having trouble finding an audience too - and if they'd been looking at advertising revenue, we would never have seen "The Dead Planet" let alone an actual Dalek.

If this sounds like sour grapes because a show I was watching got canned, you'd be wrong: I was far more invested in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which was just as interesting and well written, but also didn't get an audience. Primarily, I think, because not enough things exploded.

It's possible that Defying Gravity was too scifi for the Not We and not Scifi enough for the We. It's possible that the We decided there were too many squishy organic relationship things going on and this show was clearly for [edit: Not We], while the Not We were having a hard time reconciling the presence of people in space and an alien with romance and angst. These things are not mutually exclusive, but the audience was having a hard time deciding whether it liked the combination and ABC weren't really helping with the marketing. This show should have been perfect: it should have been a show that the Scifi Nerds with Normal Partners could have watched together, but for some reason that didn't happen. It's a shame, since I think it could have happened, but the show wasn't allowed time to develop. It was on the air for two months, and I found it on Hulu totally by accident whilst trying to find Better Off Ted.

Now imagine if this were to happen to the BBC. The typical BBC season is six episodes. If the BBC were dependent on ads it might kill a show after three. ITV axed Primeval because it was too expensive, and this means that we end up in an environment where if a show is going to succeed it has to be cheap. So you can kiss Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, a third season of Being Human, another season of Survivors and almost anything else not guaranteed high viewing figures goodbye. The TV landscape doesn't have space for anything that isn't able to justify the production costs, which is why we have seen so much reality TV over the years and why so much if it is awful.

It also means that TV becomes formulaic, that there is little or no risk taking in story or script, that you simply don't take chances. Look at the output of the BBC over the last few years and compare it to ITV and Channel 4. Look at the output of NBC, CBS, ABC and compare them with HBO.

If we end up parceling out the license fee or making the BBC accept adverts, we will end up with conservative, dull, ugly TV where nothing interesting or dangerous ever happens.

The alternative to the BBC is not something we want to see, because the alternative is shit.

I was writing

2009-09-24T22:01:00.000-07:00

So, successes.

I've been published by Tweet The Meat four times. Yay! Click the link to read the stuff.

My contributions to The Celestial Toybox , the magazine of The Doctor Who Appreciation Society, continue unabated. Next up is issue 375/6 which contains a piece I did on The Cartmel Masterplan. I forget the grand total of issues I've appeared in, but we're looking at half a dozen at least.

Today I completed a bit on the first appearance of The Daleks, revised it (it's lots better now, but bears little or no resemblance to the original).

I make progress with the whole "Time War" thing. I now have one piece revised and another piece in dire need of tweaking. I was always impressed and amused by the dialog between spaceships that happens in Iain M. Banks's "Culture" novels (particularly "Excession") and this resulted in an attempt to write a short story that appears entirely as recorded data. Here's an extract:

[REDACT: node creation parameters restricted to Level 4 and above. If you require access to this data please see your supervisor]
[REDACT: 1.7s placement and space/time data restricted to level 4 and above.]
[REDACT: 4s traffic shaping - non neccessary data]

Identities Present.
AnsharadLiTom77-(red)[1337LART]
ChellPhanAnnie12-(blue)[SomeAssemblyRequired]
PanTorPan-element-Tor-element-Tor[LikenessOfAFreshYoungMaid]

+/set Tom
+/set Chell
+/set Tor

Tom - it's good to be with you again.
Chell - hello tom! It's been a while.
Tor - =image: sunrise over a snowfield=
Tom - it's good to see you too, Tor. We have about 20 seconds here before you go out of range. Do you have anything to share with us?

=stream: 127y data=
Tor - =image: an empty plate, remnants of food and a wineglass with a red residue in the bottom=
Chell - I bet! Wow. That's nearly a whole month's data. You're lucky to be out as far as you are.
Tor - =image: a child's birthday party. several laughing infant humans are present=
Tom - what, all the time?
Chell - I've spotted something interesting here. Tor, the third and ninth packets show an anomalous trend. Can you confirm that for me?
Tor - [ABRIDGED: half a second's worth of astrophysical data related to gravity, depicted as several charts and graphics]
Tor - =image: Rodin's Thinker=
Tor - =image: lightbulb=
Tor - [ABRIDGED: 1/100th of a second further equations and graphics relating to astrophyiscal and cosmological theory]
Tom - well, that's just not very likely.

BOX

Tom - what was that?

++CARRIER LOST - [LikenessOfAFreshYoungMaid]++

Chell - whoa.
Tom - one moment

/locate [LikenessOfAFreshYoungMaid]
\terminus not found

Tom - that's absurd. Even if the ship was destroyed it would take seconds

/display elapsed time
\session open for 2.1 seconds

It needs a bit of work, but I'm essentially happy with it. Of course, it's the last story in the sequence and now I have to go back and write the middle two, and then the one that occurred to me as being quite a cool idea but wasn't part of the plan at all, and possibly the other one that I'm sort of kicking around in a semi-amused fashion.

Anyway, when they are done they will be pulled together as one volume (called something like "Collateral Damage: A Possible History of the Last Great Time War") and presented for download and enjoyment as an ebook. Or eNovella. Or whatever. Part one is already at close to 10k words, so obviously I'd like to finish it and see what happens next.

The plan, such as it is, would be to have this ebook and invite people to d/l it for free, read it, review it if they like and tell people about it. I'd be interested in seeing what people think.

The Government really needs a good firing.

2009-09-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

That's a bit of a contentious title.

I mean the Government of the UK, or at least the bits of it that won't listen to the board of advisors that they appointed to reel the BBC in and make them behave.

HMG planned to "top slice" (whatever that means) 130 million off the license fee in 2010 and give it to ITV and Channel 4 (or just C4) on the basis that they too perform elements of public service broadcasting.

The BBC Trust have been doing some research and have discovered that the recent 5.50 rise in the fee, levied to pay for the switch to digital, needs to go away next year - after the switch is completed. I'd rather it was kept on and the extra fiver went to making a new series of Torchwood, or perhaps was used to commission some new programming in from some new writers. Maybe we could have another poetry season. However, the general public thinks it should go and the license fee should come down.

OK.

They also said that the general public does NOT want C4 or ITV getting hold of the license fee, or any part of it.

Here's the whole story including the whys and wherefores of the survey.

The Daily Mail puts it like this.

The Daily Mail is owned by The Daily Mail and General Trust, who have a subsidiary called DMG, who own a 20% interest in ITN...well, Wiki has a general list here, with appropriate caveats about trusting Wiki entirely.

Essentially, the Daily Mail's parent company is in direct competition with the BBC, both for local and national news, and has a significant internet presence to defend - a presence which is going to either have to change business models or disappear behind a paywall while the BBC continues to be "free".

The Government's response to the license fee issue was "well, we might anyway" - which is why it needs firing. The people have spoken, at least in a poll, and this should indicate that they've got to rethink.

James Murdoch Hates The BBC.

2009-09-07T17:51:00.000-07:00

It looks like the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, because this
Murdoch is as Howling Mad as his dad!

...what?

James Murdoch says the scope of the BBC's ambition is "chilling". So?
It's a corporation created by Royal Charter at a time when Great Britain owned two thirds of the gorram planet.

James says it's impossible to compete with the BBC because it gives things away free.

James is wrong.

The license fee pays for the BBC and everyone with a TV pays the licence fee. So it ain't free. If you want to build up a case against the BBC having the licence fee, be a better public service
broadcaster than they are. Make your content better and drain away their audience. Spend some money on the things that your network shows. You know, compete.

James says that the BBC is a state broadcaster. Except that the State doesn't really like the BBC. James works in the News Corporation, which also owns Fox, so his relationship with current events is going to be shaky at best. James may have missed the Government of the UK punishing the anti-government BBC by threatening its funding. James may have missed that
a DG got sacked for telling the truth about the UK's entry into Gulf War 2. James may regularly miss that, while the BBC is the Crown's deal, it's the Exchequer that collects the License Fee.

He's also missed that the BBC is generally known for a mild bias against the sitting Government of the day and always has been. The BBC has perennially been a thorn in the side of whoever's residing at 10 Downing Street and has developed a generation or two of political interviewers and
commentators who simply aren't all that impressed by the title "Minister".

This is hardly the behavior of a "state" broadcaster, but it's an unsurprising comment from the people that brought you Fox News, which famously won a court case in which it claimed it didn't need actual facts to broadcast news. Instead of making Fox News broadcast under the banner of "current events entertainment" or "current events opinion", it's still allowed to be a news channel. Baffling.

James Murdoch is wrong about practically everything, which is just one of the reasons that the News Corporation's profits are down and there's going to be an awful lot of scrambling to make people pay for things that were previously free. Long term, that's going to make his position worse, not better, and it's probably time that the UK took a long, hard look at the BBC and decided once and for all whether they want it.

My opinion is that it would be foolish in the extreme to allow it to disappear, and that the Government in particular needs to be aware that punishing the BBC makes them look like totalitarians and twats.

Updatingness, and stuff, and vampires and Star Trek

2009-09-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

The State of Play.

I have, I think, a mere six weeks left of my time in the USA. I shall miss
bits of it.

In the next six weeks, I have to reduce my life to less than 100,
preferably less than 80, lbs of stuff. I have to quit my job, quit my
apartment and leave behind everything that the last eight years has meant.
Then I have to rebuild it all in another country.

I admit, I'm nervous. Eager for the challenge, but nervous.

It's all uncomfortably close. Right around the corner, this big change.

Vampires

I've seen Let the Right One In and ooo, that was good. Dubbed into English, since I don't speak Swedish. The Americans don't think anyone will understand a movie set in Sweden and are remaking it. I certainly hope they don't get it wrong.

The film itself was written by the guy who wrote the book, so it's interesting to see what cuts and changes he made, alongside a director who was dead set on making the entire book into a movie and using all of it. Naturally, this would have been a long movie.

The movie is chilling, not so much for vampire creepery, but because the location and the characters contribute to the feeling that everyone and everything in the film are somehow trapped. Trapped by habit, by weakness, by immortality, by desires and by actions. It presents a really bleak picture which herds you and hems you in. It's also strangely beautiful.

Plus, the writer actually sat down and wondered what happens if a vampire enters a dwelling uninvited. Score!

I also rediscovered the 1998 TV show Ultraviolet starring all sorts of interesting people. Joe Ahearne wrote and directed this single series 6 episode run about vampires and the government team that investigates them. If you want to know what Torchwood pre-Children of Earth could have been, and what Torchwood post COE might be, it's worth buying the DVD and watching this intelligent, interesting show.

I have also seen Star Trek. Excellent cast, excellent fun, makes my inner scifi geek sit up and scream with anger while at the same time making me love the heck out of everything that happens. I can point to a half dozen things that were rubbish (like being able to see Vulcan from Delta Vega) whilst at the same time willingly ignoring absolutely everything because of the main cast's performances and the breakneck speed of the plot.

Less lens flair next time, though.

Craftsman, Artist or Professional?

2009-06-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

This was inspired by a conversation I had, or at least a couple of tweets I
exchanged, this morning with @digitalfiction.

Is it fiction? Or Content?

Blimey.

But it's an important distinction. Are we doing this for the sake of art
or are we in it for the money? Or both? These days, what is the Writer?

Let me get my personal nonsense out of the way first: if I'm any good as a
writer it's because there is a part of me that wants to be a craftsman.
I'm slightly too cynical to consider myself an Artist (and perhaps too self
conscious to risk making that claim) and I'm deeply suspicious of anything
that sounds like management speak. It sounds like the world is once again
relegating the writer to a mere backroom person, a shadowy figure wreathed
in whisky sweat, swearing and cigarette smoke who emerges from some troglodyte
twilight world clutching double spaced typewritten paper. It sounds like
the delivery mechanism exists to be provided with content, as if the writer
is enslaved by it.

There are writers apparently in thrall to the blank page, who cannot see a
space without attempting to fill it with words and ideas. I am not one of
them, as evidenced by my startling output this year alone. I think the
rest of us write for different reasons.

One of them appears to be theb ability to create short items of almost no value that nevertheless trigger Google to place interesting adverts. A lot of content provision systems rely on this targeted writing, most of which it devoid of character, usefulness, interest or spark. Believe me, I've tried it. It soon palls and you wish you were doing something else. Preferably something creative.

I think this might be a cart before the horse issue. Folks want to make money, preferably not by going to work for someone else in a cubicle. It occurs to them that they have two markets - people who like to read things and people who want to write things. They can probably monetize the website with adsense or something very like it. There are business models that will provide an actual income stream from a site that's set up the right way. At this point, it doesn't matter what the content is. You could, potentially, make money out of bloody awful slash or fanfic (if it
wasn't someone else's IP and the faast route to having your rear sued off by a major publisher or studio), because it attracts a loyal audience. If you include a way for writers to communicate with readers, you've got another reason for people to stay on the site and spend time abnsorbing the ads.

As I said, at this point it doesn't matter what the content is because it's camouflage for the advertising. That's content provision and the sole intention of the site is to provide the owner with an income stream; it has the secondary effect of making amateur writers feel important. I know this because it's the exact reason I've wanted to contribute to similar sites -
you find a market that pays actual money and it makes you feel like a legit writer, no matter how amateur you really are.

So I suspect the answer to whether we are content providers or writers depends entirely on why we do what we do.

It's not only the online world that behaves in this way. The standard publishing industry also behaves in a manner more or less guaranteed to restrict the author. The publishing industry would like more than a few authors to become brand names, because that guarantees sales. This is something I learned from the Fantasy genre, and Dave Langford (way back when he was writing a review column for White Dwarf (which, at the time, was a magazine about more than one game), and I'm showing my age now). Why are there so many fantasy trilogies? Because fans cut their teeth on Lord of the Rings and expect these types of book to come in threes. These days at least threes. Or in multiples of three. Or five. Which makes life really interesting if you've got a really good idea for a stand alone fantasy novel.

The desire for more of the same - the McDonalds Instinct - is the desire for what we know to be comfortable and safe; we will buy what we already know we like. People who refuse to live in that comfort zone are strange, hard to advertise to, and interesting.

I'm straying. Essentially, the publishing industry wants writers to be deliverers of content too and it's a rare author that refuses to stay put (Neil Gaiman seems to pretty much do what he wants when he wants to, and it generally turns out rather well) or finds a place in which to write anything that they want whilst kidding us all that it's another in a long line of similar books. And yes, Terry Pratchett, I am looking at you.

I think those writers who make a decision to stick to what sells are making a rational and intelligent choice, because I would gnaw off my own...ooo...left leg in order to be paid well enough to quit working in a soul destroying cubical and to sit at a computer writing all day. I would! And if I want to, all I need to do is write something that people like and sell it. Then do it again, and again, until someone realises that they can make quite a bit of money from my labours and pays me to stop going to work and to work for them instead.

I'd do it, too.

But where does that leave art? I think the position of writer as artist hasn't changed an awful lot. I think if you're writing for the sake of art, if you're writing for the sheer joy of writing, nothing's going to stop you so long as someone, some long suffering friend or tiny audience, is reading you. Eventually we might find that the artists come back into fashion. I hope so. I'd quite like to see what the Content Managers make of it.

Digital Britain: Rant Warning. Sweariness ahoy.

2009-06-16T16:06:00.000-07:00

The Digital Britain report is out and I'm not convinced by it.

There are good things -

50p a month to ensure 2mbp broadband nationwide by 2012 (just in time to
stream the apocalypse). Nice one.

Three Strike Rule for File Sharers. - not so good. Here's why:

1: Competition.
- no UK ISP is going to hand customers to a competitor. I worked for a
cable ISP in the USA who enforced the DMCA by suspending access and
terminating it for repeat offenders. It worked because we were the only
game in town. No one else was willing to drag the internet out to the cuds
where we did, so if you were busted for DMCA three times, your internet was
GONE and not coming back. If we'd had competitors, there would have been a
different business model. In the UK there are a dizzying number of ways to
get internet service, so if I'm determined to go P2P and get busted, I will
switch provider, be back on line very quickly thereafter.

2: Privacy.
- the way in which you catch a person sharing copyrighted files over a P2P
network is to browse the share folder they keep on their computer. Let's
imagine for a moment that you'd be dumb enough to leave all the illegal
material you own in that folder: the P2P network has access to it, because
that's the point of Peer To Peer sharing: as you download a file you're
also uploading it to other people who are downloading it...and uploading it
to still others. It means that someone out there is using the P2P client,
or something very like it, to wander around looking at the contents of your
share folder. Sure, if you can be identified as seeding a copyrighted file
then you could be in trouble. But otherwise, it's an open invitation for
people to snoop.

In the USA, the DMCA makes it clear that it's seeding and sharing that
people have a problem with: leech all you want!

3: Technical expertise and workarounds.
- I am not a hacker, not even close to being a hacker. Yet even I, less
than a script-kiddie, know more than one way to share a file. The comments
in the Digital Britain report make it seem as though P2P is the only way,
but I know it's not.
- I know that if I want to share files that I shouldn't be sharing, I need
to obscure my tracks on the internet. I can do this several ways. If I
was technically minded, I would do some learning and read up about IP
spoofing. After all, the primary way to track internet activity is by IP
address and if you can hide yours, or make yours look like someone else's,
so much the better. I've seen people become victims of this sort of thing.
- there are legitimate services out there - FTP, Drop Box, newsgroups -
that share information and are specifically created to do so. Sharing
information is what the Internet is about. Unless someone is get all
President Madagascar about the internet and block everything except Port
80, someone is going to find a way to use a legit service to do something
they shouldn't.

Solution?
- Make getting access to your content easy and worthwhile. Do a decent
deal with the artists and creative people for Digital Rights. Recognise
that the internet, and the people who use it, have very little time for
borders and geography. Don't geo-lock content, make it available for
subscription or by accepting the presence of advertising. If your content
is good enough and the service simple enough, chances are I'll pay a fee to
watch a show.
- if you are the artist, look...I have to confess, my relationship with
your art is much stronger when I have a relationship with you. My
favourite writers all have a presence on Twitter, for example, and have
demostrated that they think a bit like I do. Instant connection, and
instant desire to keep them working on their art by...ta.daaaaa! Buying
Their Stuff!
- Stop stressing about Monetizing things. Ferthelovamike, the Internet
does not require monetizing! It is not a place! It is not a product! And
fuck you if you think it is! The internet is a delivery system and a
communications tool. You don't have to monetize it, you just have to have
a product people want to pay for. What a lot of companies are running into
is that people genuinely don't think their products are worth paying for.
- Any old shit you choose to give us is will no longer do.

BBC Shares Licence Fee with ITV and C4
- No. Thrice no and double fuck off.
- for one thing, did the BBC go crying to .gov when ITV and C4 were riding
high? No. Have .gov beaten the BBC like a dog and dragged it around the
yard? Yes. Is a media free from corporate editorial control and also free
from the .gov influence a good thing that we're about to lose?

Yes.

IF ITV and C4 are unable to generate revenue from advertising, because
their programming is unable to capture viewers, I do not want to subsidize
them. They have failed. I'm very sorry about that, because even at it's
worst C4 is head and shoulders above the likes of ABC, and I'm also sorry
that ITV and C4 weren't smart enough to compete with Sky, or Virgin. We
keep being told we are a capitalist nation, and that means sometimes
companies fail. It should not ever be the job of the government to prop up
failing businesses.

It is also a terrible mistake to sacrifice the BBC in order to do it.
The BBC is:

The best news service in the world, although I hear surprising things about
Al Jazeera.
The most comprehensive and consistently the highest quality radio service
in the world. BBC 7 in particular has been a thing of joy - the other
night I lay back, headphones on, tea in hand, listening to Alan Bennett
read "The Wind in the Willows". Glorious. Utterly glorious.

If ITV and C4 cannot compete without sharing in the BBC's revenue source -
which has been an excuse for the forces of .gov to hold the BBC to ransom
over the last decade or so - then they have failed as ventures. If C4 is
the natural home of digital innovation, why do I not ever visit a single C4
website? Why do I never hear about the exciting things they are doing?
And why are we going to punish the BBC because they failed?

If we divert funds from the BBC, we stand to see a drop in program quality.
I for one am not willing to miss out on stuff like Top Gear, Doctor Who,
Ashes to Ashes, Being Human and a variety of other shows the BBC has
produced in the last few years. I don't want talent shows, or reality
shows. I want stuff like the BBC's poetry season or QI. Stuff, in other
words, that if I know where to look I can find online. Because people
think it's worth sharing and preserving. A lot of it...most of it...seems
to be BBC content.

It argues that people are not generally keen to share the output of other channels because it's of a limited appeal. Folks in America are generally very impressed with BBC output, and some stuff from elsewhere - Primeval ( now cancelled! Booo!) and Skins, for example.

Enough of this for the moment.

I own an e-book reader!

2009-06-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

I said I wouldn't buy a Kindle.

Actually, I bought a Kindle 2.

The Kindle DX was too expensive; this was the sole reason for not
pre-ordering it, although now I read a few of the reviews I'm wondering if
I didn't make the right choice anyway.

What I wanted was an e book reader that would replace my library of
paperbacks, because I keep being parted from my nests of books by my habit
of relocating. The idea is that if I get a reader with enough space I can
have as many books as possible and take them all with me. The Kindle 2
holds 1500, which seems like a suitably vast amount. Even with my
compulsive need to fill all available storage space with stuff (which is
why my PC's hdd and the external HDD and my various flash drives are all
crowded) it's going to take me a while to fill 1.4gig with e-books.

And indeed it will. I went through a total frenzy of finding, downloading
and in some cases converting free ebooks into Kindle readable format. I
have well over 100 ebooks now, and I have noticed a couple of things
already.

Firstly, the Kindle 2 itself:

- it's light, easy to handle, I'm not bothered about page turning. It's
as simple and as satisfying to click a button as it is to turn a page. It
has the advantage that, when I'm reading in bed and drop the book, I don't
lose my page. The disadvantage is that I can't turn quickly to a section,
but I haven't investigated the possibility of marking spots I want to
return to yet. The Kindle2 has a variety of functions that I haven't
played with yet, and these are fast becoming things I am saving for wet
Sunday afternoons (not that we get many in Phoenix). I also want to
question the wisdom of having the manual in the reader, even though it's
well set out and seems to contain all of the examples you need to figure
out the operations it describes.

I have, of course, played with the wireless settings. Books really do
arrive in a minute or less, which takes the waiting out of ordering stuff
online. That delay to gratification was always an issue with a
biblioaddict like me, and now I can get most of the things I want
immediately.

The web browser is primitive and the screen not well suited to reading
anything but the simplest human readable text. Which, honestly, is for the
best. I have managed to navigate some picture heavy sites by kicking the
browser into Advanced mode - and the e-ink screen is not well suited to
reproducing colour pictures, nor websites with dark backgrounds. It's
worth using the links to places like Wiki, and it will be worth my while to
pop back to one site in particular to change my preferences to make it
kindle readable. Why?
Well...to have an electronic book through which I can access The
Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, essentially, geek heaven. So I want
to. I think the Kindle will be able to read the site properly if I use
Brunel instead of Classic Goo.

But think about it - I can access the Guide via an electronic book. How
Douglas Adams is that?

I haven't tried the text to speech feature, although if I can find a copy of
"A Brief History of Time" I might have the Kindle read that to me.
I also haven't tried using the Kindle 2 as an MP3 player, because I already
have one of those. It's nice to know I can listen to Audiobooks, but, as I
said, I have an MP3 player which packs a couple of gig more than the
Kindle2, so I shall save the space on the K2 for actual books.

In short, it's easy and pleasant to use. I'm not getting into the politics
of the Kindle2, the DRM nonsense et al - please see the collected works of
people like John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow for the full SP - they know far
more than me.

The other thing the Kindle2 has opened up is the real utility of the
Creative Commons Licence, and it's also had an effect on me.
I admit, free is my favourite price. And I also admit that I'm unhappy
about having a copy of something I haven't paid for, and therefore it is
lovely to see folks like Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi
making stories and, indeed, whole novels available under Creative Commons.
The side effect is that I now want to buy their books.

I do! I want the physical object as much as ever and the Kindle is a nice
way to have a portable version. But when I'm settled again, and have
bookshelves, a priority will be given to buying the works of authors I have
read and enjoyed thanks to Creative Commons.

Published and Paid!

2009-05-29T17:31:00.000-07:00

Me!

I was!

OK, calm down. It's Tweet The Meat and it's for the princely sum of a dollar, and you can read it sometime next week on Twitter.

So, you know, only a potential audience of 8 million or so people.

However, paid for fiction! It might be 140 character fiction, but paid! Next ambition: paid for longer fiction! And also, I think I'll try and get published via Tweet The Meat again.

Right. Markets to research, things to write.

Quick and Dirty Blog Post. No, not that kind of dirty. Honestly, minds in the gutter, the lot of you.

2009-05-24T01:17:00.001-07:00

Item! Twitter does something useful!

Yep. It unexpectedly recommended me some music. The Lost, in fact. Utterly unlike my normal playlist fare, I happened to mention on Twitter that I liked clever lyrics and lo! the chap behind The Lost suggested I might like his stuff.

He was right.

Item! Dave Buggered for Inspiration!

You know how it goes, sometimes. Well, it's done more than go, it's gone!

Item! Audiobooks of Note.

I bought the first of the Lankmar series, from Audible. Having never read Lieber (for shame! for shame!) I wasn't sure what I was in for. Now I think I'm hooked.

The New Word Order

2009-05-07T12:35:00.000-07:00

Back on April 1st, I instituted a real, honest to goodness competition.
When one comments, one is required to enter a random clump of letters to show one is not a spambot.

I have asked that commenters turn these into words and define them, with the very best winning something at the end of the year.

It's been a month - so how are we doing?

Eletingl - the creeping sense of horror you get when you suspect that a large animal has crept up on you very quietly and is now RIGHT BEHIND YOU.
- Lucy McGough

offacho: The kind of sneeze that makes you fall backwards from the bench you're sitting on.
- mand

saxirei: a complicated variety of clasp worn at the neck of Plyoogian cloaks and capes.
- mand

Armina - small Muslim country hiding in the mountains of Kazakhstan, hoping that no-one invades it. Exports horse-milk yoghurt and turquoise.
- Lucy McGough

frinessa: the state of being unable to distinguish between memories and dreams. Can occur when asleep or awake.
- Lucy McGough

dersh: the sound all that water makes when you close your umbrella suddenly
- mand

Noppr - Someone who, though tired beyond all reasonable measure, is prevented from taking refuge in sleep due to being sat at a desk (usually at work, though in the case of a noppree little work will actually be taking place).

Sometimes caused by being set a tedious task by your employer, or 'nopprific'...
- Graymalkin

mulneden, which is the practice of denying, while EITHER holding one's nose OR suffering a broken nose or nosebleed (though some authorities hold that mulneddlibbnen is the more correct term in the latter case), that one has recently ingested mulled wine.
- mand

So far so good. Keep commenting! And I'll attempt to post things that make you want to comment a bit more often, to keep the momentum going.

Gubbins

2009-05-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

Rather foolishly, I have more or less convinced myself that if I can get a few things out of my head I can go back to work and concentrate.

So here I am. Doing precisely what I want to do instead of what I should be doing, which is a wretched and guilt-laden thing. But as John Ruskin said "Labour without joy is base".

What I want to be doing is writing, as usual. I put together four submissions for Tweet the Meat, dispatched them and felt gleeful about it. There is something immensely satisfying about having completed work which does not extend to actual employment work itself. The answer is to become much more intense about the work I would prefer to be doing, so that it becomes the work I live on. That's going to be an amusing journey, because I have to become a lot less lazy.

There are an assortment of excellent things happening. Two pieces for Celestial Toybox are in the works (one almost done, one still in the planning stages), I'm researching a new market (links etc when I know what it's all about) and working towards finishing a short story that has been around for ages, which rather lost it's way. The last bout of mania kicked off a whole swathe of short stories which I now need to work on, including -

the "Time War" fics.
- a rewrite of "Daleks on Goth", which is now actually not bad.
- a fic about Dhiren Koduri.
- a fic about Roseli
- a fic provisionally entitled "Prisoner of the Daleks", which I now have to retitle because someone has written an actual Doctor Who novel with that title.
- I have to plan and write a fic about Tom the PostHuman, because that's the last part of the characters trilogy, and should be about the fall of Gallifrey, possibly.

Parting Gesture
- which has been "in the works" forever, and needs to be finished.

and a few other things that are currently no more than a frantic scribble or two and an enthused note.

In related happiness: Write Monkey is a lovely thing and those who would like a distraction free writing environment will find it useful. I'm enjoying it. I would be enjoying it a lot more if they made a version for Linux, and I might well make a perm. swap to Ubuntu 9.04, or the next LTS version, and use Write Monkey via WINE, or something similar.

In a week, I shall look back on this post and giggle at my optimism.

Swine Flu 2

2009-04-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

I think I might have Tweeted about this; on the way to work this morning, listening to KFrothingYankeeIdiot, the conversation in the car turned to Swine Flu. It's a serious concern; we're waiting for Grace and Michaela's school to close thanks to a pupil coming down with flu symptoms and, if that happens, there's a domino effect: if Grace and Mike were exposed, then Danielle was, and if she was then I was. Basically, we have to stay home until we get sick, get better or five days passes with no symptoms.

One thing that's not helping: it's allergy season. A lot of plants are blooming, which means a lot of people are sneezing and spluttering. It's hard to tell whether you're sick or are having an allergic reaction to something. It also means an awful lot of people are sneezing all over the place, which is going to increase the changes of catching whatever they've just sneezed.

Although AZ was H1N1 free, today we hear that there are four cases; we get to work to find notes on the doors: if you're symptomatic or have been to Mexico, don't come into the building. This afternoon, we hear that the W.H.O. (still think they should be the United Nations Infection Taskforce) has upped their alert level and, moments ago, the company has put out a cheerful reminder that we need to maintain good personal hygiene etc. The key is "stay home if you are unwell" - and this is worth pointing out because it runs contrary to American corporate culture. People who get sick come to work. They sit in their cubes making unhappy gurgling noises and demand sympathy, or complain loudly in the elevators that they're so very, very ill and yet still at work. Well, no more of that. They now need to go home, and they also need to start following some very specific rules about coming back to work.

It's all getting a little more serious. I will probably check the bank account and make a couple of sensible purchases - water, fever reducers, some other helpful odds and ends - just in case. You know, the sort of stuff you should probably have in a flat anyway. I can normally rely on my immune system. It's put up with all kinds of abuse, and it generally copes with invaders thuswise: it invites them in for a few drinks and a game of pool, gets them horribly drunk, feeds them a suspicious kebab and then lets them enjoy the hangover next day. The point is, when it comes time for the virus to replicate, it's so drunk it can't, and the following day it's so mortified at the thought it might have replicated the niht before that it doesn't want to and shuffles off looking for a way home that involves meeting the fewest gazes possible.

Don't knock it. My disreputable immune system works.

Anyway, I'm slightly concerned because I'm the least fit I have ever been (and that's saying something...I am blob! Hear me...eat crisps!) and therefore at risk from viruses. If I was a PC, I'd be running unpatched XP with an equally unpatched IE6. It seems like a good time to put some measures in place that mean I can look after myself if I do get ill.

Swine Flu Fever

2009-04-28T08:06:00.001-07:00

I love situations that contain an inherrant contradiction (which is why Discordianism is right for me!). So you can imagine how pleased I was to hear KFYI host Bruce Jacobs this morning, complaining about the Government's response to Swine Flu.

Bruce thinks we should be all President Madagascar* about the problem. American should close borders, should be checking people who fly in from Mexico at the airports, and the Government should be a part of this.

Bruce is, of course, a conservative. He would prefer the Government stay out of his business. He would prefer to take care of his own healthcare requirements and not be a part of any government mandated universal healthcare plan, or even have the government tell him what he can and cannot do about his own health. Until now, of course.

Bruce has tried to insist that the Bush administration laid in good stocks of 'flu vaccine. Of course, it did. For a different variant of flu. Bruce, it's not like prescription meds where you can get a less costly generic brand. Influenza vaccines have to be made to fight a specific strain or they're useless. So right now, the stockpile is useless for treating Swine Flu. Not that it matters to Bruce, howling for the Government to take charge and DO things!

Actually, the government has done about all it can; the best things for people to do right now are all about taking good care of themselves and reducing the risk of getting the disease. Stay away from crowds, wash your hands, try not to sneeze all over people. What else works? Well, not much right now. I would say "it's only the flu" but previous flu pandemics were horrific and I don't want to come back to this blog having crawled out of the smoking remains of civilisation to say "uhh...yeah...about that whole swine flu thing...".

I just find it interesting that Talk Radio is politicizing the disease and the response to the disease, that the conservative angle is at odds with their statements about how little they want the government to interfere in things, how they ask for airlines and airports to institute screening with no thought about cost or organisation (how many flights into how many airports around the country? And isn't it already too late? Because the virus has shown up in New York, and assorted other spots around the world, so to start screening now would be pointless: it's got dozens of other transmission routes already, and will already have spread via the various hubs...won't it?). I also find it ironic, since Bruce is the guy who hates Journalists and who seems incapable of doing the minimal research required to prevent himself sounding like an ass.

*some explanation is required. This is a reference to an online game called Pandemic 2, in which the player crafts and releases a disease with the express purpose of wiping out all human life on the planet. Part of the difficulty is getting your disease everywhere before countries close their borders - with Madagascar being particularly prone to isolating itself from the rest of the world. Hence this cartoon .

Weird Dave is Weird.

2009-04-23T11:39:00.000-07:00

You know those days when nothing goes as you need it to, but nothing fails badly enough to warrant a bit fo a sob and some sympathy?

I'm having one of those.

It begins last night, with the Little Blue Pills of Doom.

I've not been sleeping well, not for about three weeks now; I've had no more than three or four hours sleep a night, which has started to affect my ability to think and also my temper. This is not a good thing for work, let alone anything else. On Tuesday, I caved in and went to the drug store. I bought a box of sleepy-time type tablets that were guaranteed non-habit forming etc. They didn't work at all on Tuesday night when I was awake until midnight and then only briefly able to sleep thereafter. Last night, I tried them again and was asleep by 7pm.

The dreams were interesting. Apparently, the pills pushed my body into sleep and left my head spinning, because I remember several vivid elements from my dreams.

Element One: the most awful horror film ever made. Not awful as in scary or gory, awful as in "dear god, did I pay money to watch this?" I remember watching this movie and seeing very low budget effects and makeup. I remember thinking it was utterly unconvincing. And then I was in it. The thing about unconvincing effects is that apparently the real thing is just as unconvincing.

Luckily, there were other people trapped in the movie with me and they had been there for some time. They rescued me from a horrific scene where something tried to make Richard Dean Anderson look younger by literally slicing pieces of his head off in an attempt to resculpt him.

My rescuers were older folks, all drove a volvo station wagon/estate car (there were six people and three cars, and they were all the same car. No, not three identical cars, the same car. Co-location? I have no idea myself) and claimed to be able to help me defend myself. They said they had guns.

Guns are what people never have in horror movies, but even so I was dubious as to their potential effectiveness. My rescuers seemed to be confident, so I was taken to their house to kit up. They had a Queen Anne style house - that would be Addams Family/Bates house style - with a really big garage and a lot of exposed interior walls. They showed me the guns: I was expecting revolvers or somesuch, and what I got was a transparent green plastic cylinder about 30cm long, with a darker green screw-cap at one end and a big metal spring at the other. There was a hole about half way along the cylinder. I was cheerfully informed that this was where the bullet exited, so I was to press the gun to the chest of the target and pull the trigger.

I pointed out that this was retarded. The sole advantage of a gun over, say, a machete, is that you can hurt people from a distance. Granted, the likes of Jason Voorhees are generally depicted as bullet proof, but my contention was that with a high enough rate of fire or a big enough round you could at least make the scary individual fall over andget time to run away.

I was told I was wrong. I then found that I couldn't load the gun; the big spring wouldn't coil, I couldn't put any pressure on it. Someone loaded the gun for me, but I could already see that the bullets were pointing to the screwcap instead of the hole; when the trigger was pulled, even with the exit hole pressed to the chest of the target, the gun would miss.

Now utterly baffled, I woke up very briefly and then went back to sleep and right back to the same dream, wherein I stayed.

When the alarm went off I stopped it and it took me 15 minutes to get out of bed. I couldn't find anything to shave with. It took me five minutes to find the shampoo that was on a shelf in front of me. It took me five minutes to find clean clothes, because I stood in the closet blinking stupidly at everything. All in all I was damned lucky to make it out of the flat.

I got to work, feeling that coffee would help; it hasn't. This is the only thing I have been able to concentrate on all morning, and I can only do this because the little blue pills have started wearing off, leaving me feeling very like a marionette with half his strings cut. As I type, I am making way moretypos than normal because my fingers are having problems registering that they have pressed the keys on the keyboard. My sense of space is off. And I am having real difficulty concentrating on repetative tasks.

It's almost as though a hemisphere of my brain has stopped working. I feel really creative, but can't pursue any mechanical task or exercise much in the way of logic. Like, i want to write but have no idea what to write or how to write it; the only reason that I can type this entry is because I am doing it in metapad and doing it in a stream of consciousness style. Occasionally with my eyes shut.

So it's all a bit mental.

Plus, the MP3 player has decided it can't sort itself out any more and has signalled to me that it needs my help. The oddness of the day means that what I really want to do right now is rush home and spend a couple of hours diagnosing and correcting the Firmware issue. I know I can (one of the reasons I love my MP3 player so much is that I feel very connected to it, having had to fix it myself on a number of occasions. I wouldn't part with it now, not after investing time and brainpower in nursing it through a couple of illnesses, and it has rewarded me by nursing me through my latest patch of oddness) so I will. The poor thing needs a firmware reinstall and a bit of a format; then I think I will reload the various audiobooks I was planning to listen to.

Why am I mentioning this? Because when it became clear that the MP3 player couldn't help itself I immediately wanted to go home, there and then, because I do not have (and cannot get) the tools to fix it at work. That's making me sadder than I ought to be.

See? Told you everything was a bit mental today.

"No taxation without representation", they told their elected representatives...

2009-04-20T20:32:00.000-07:00

It's been a week of "...wait...what?" for me.

American politics has possibly never been stranger than it is right now, and never more full of interesting jargon and spelling mistakes.

Over the last weeks, the Tea Party movement has been in full swing. Republicans and conservatives have been peacefully protesting against everything from the Obama tax plan to legal abortion and illegal immigration. They have done so to a slightly sinister backdrop too. Here's the fun stuff:

At the tail end of last week the Department of Homeland Security (who, you will remember, were created following 9/11 and given lots of happy powers by the Patriot Act) released an intelligence document to law enforcement groups around the country. There is nothing unusual in this. There are a couple of things to be aware of, though. Firstly, these days the DHS is run by Janet Napolitano, former Guv of Arizona. She's a Democrat. Second, the paper asked Law Enforcement to be aware that assorted factors (amongst them the election of the President) that might lead to a resurgence of activity by right-wing extremist groups. The document is here. Be warned, it's a PDF. And dull.

The paragraph that caused a problem reads thus:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups),
and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

At around this time, we have had the Governor of Texas blathering about total support for States Rights and secession from the Union; however, since the Tea Party folks were supposed to be protesting about unfair taxation, which would make them a single issue protest, talk radio, KFYI in the Phoenix Metro area specifically), and most notably Bruce Jacobs have been referring to tea-party attendees as "fellow extremists", commenting that attendees are now likely to be on the government's "list".

The protests went off without a hitch, or a black-bag operation, or any signs of rendition. They were peaceful.

However. It's worth noting that more than a couple of people I work with told me they were nervous about going; they didn't want to be on a government watch list. They didn't want to be taken from their homes in a dawn raid.

Bit extreme, I thought. But then KFYI has genuinely been creating a lot of concern that the current government is really socialist. And not socialist in the slightly affable Tony Benn way, but socialist in the Joseph Stalin manner. These are, in fact, more scare tactics. But more than that, it's interesting to do the background research. KFYI is an affiliate of the Fox network, and Fox is owned by The News Corporation. The News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch. So, this apparently grass roots organisation is being supported and advertised by possibly the world's most successful capitalist and certainly the world's most successful owner of information. This has been enough to make a lot of left wing commentators in the USA call foul, claiming that the Tea Party movement isn't grass roots, but an Astroturf movement.

Assorted shenanigans aside, a couple of things have struck me.

One: the tea party people have started referring to themselves as Tea-Baggers and what they do as tea-bagging. Oh, dear lord, some people want to reach for their Urban Dictionary before they speak.

Two: As an immigrant, I'm the only person I know who has to pay tax but has absolutely no say in any political forum in this country. None. I'm not a citizen (not going to be one, now) and therefore I have no political representation other than whatever Civis Britannicus Sum gets me. Which ain't going to be much. So when a bunch of white Americans start on about not having any representation, I get a bad case of the "Wait...whut?"

It seems clear that the Right are attempting to make people forget that the elected representatives for a state or area or whatever are meant to represent every one in it. They don't, of course, because the minute they arrive in Washington they are immediately surrounded by Lobbyists who attach themselves to Congresscritters and Senators alike, in much the same manner that these tried to fasten themselves to Captain Kirk, resulting in mass insanity.

However, there are ways to motivate a congresscritter. It's a lot like motivating an MP. You can

- write letters;
- turn up in person for a meeting;
- send e-mails;
- threaten to report that their subsidised housing is being sublet to students/sex workers/asylum seekers;
- etc.

With a modicum of effort, it can be done. But what KFYI, and by extension the rest of the Right, would prefer, is to be back in power and to have conservatives believe that they simply can't be represented by anybody who isn't one of them.

They're trying the same schtick that got the Evangelical Fundies all crazy: a non-minority that insists it is being under-represented and repressed unless it's voice is the only one being heard.

Good Old Victor F.

2009-04-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

I was wandering through my movie collection t'other day and it struck me just how many Frankenstein movies I have.

I've got the Universal release from the 1930s, with Boris Karloff playing the monster. I've got the Hammer version, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. I've got Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein (which is still one of the funniest films ever made). I've got the sequel to the Hammer picture, I've got a copy of the not-very-good one with Brannagh and DeNiro in it. And I have a copy or two of the book, plus some of the various literary riffs on that theme.

Why? Well, mostly because it's an ace tale. A very early science fiction cautionary tale in a style that later writers like Crighton would adopt; Frankenstien says, loud and clear "look what we can do! Do you think we should?", with the undercurrent that of course we bloody shouldn't because we really have no idea what we're doing.

It's the sort of cautionary tale that can be applied to every kind of advance, from cybernetics to genetic engineering. The monster of the book is very different to that of the various movies, although following an image as startling as the Karloff makeup for the Universal release, which seared itself into the world's imagination, is this surprising? Monsters put bums on seats, not morality.

Over the years, things have changed a bit. My latest encounter with Victor and his mad science came in Dean Koontz's books; he depicts the Baron as a callous, amoral, cold scientist who has artificially extended his life and is intending to replace the human race with one of his own, much improved, design. Against him stand a couple of New Orleans cops and his original creation - now calling himself Deucallion. The books make undemanding reading, perfect for killing time in an entertaining manner. However, t'other night I came across something rather unexpected.

It's a movie known variously as "Flesh for Frankenstein" and "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein", the latter being why it drew my attention. Andy Warhol? He's not listed anywhere on the credits, but Udo Keir is. So I watched it.

In some ways, I wish I hadn't. In others, I'm so glad I did.

For one thing, quite a lot of time was spent on the look of the thing. Castle Frankenstein is labyrinthine and baroque, with plenty of places to hide and spy on people. The Baron's laboratory is a huge space complete with anatomical statues and lots of things floating in jars, but none of the electrical thingammies that we've come to expect. The costumes are interesting; filmed in the 70s, the period evoked by the look of the clothes is anywhere between 1890 and 1930 although the villagers are your standard Euro-peasant, stuck some time in the early 1700s. Because of the relaxation of censorship laws for stuff rated X, there's a fair bit of nudity and it's not limited to topless females.

In fact, the UK title (Flesh for Frankenstein) says exactly what the movie is about. It's sex. Victor's wife/sister (the two titles seem interchangable) just wants to get laid. A lot. Victor has an unhealthy fascination with internal organs and is creating two people from bits of other people. He intends them to be representatives of some off-kilter racial purity, and wants them to breed in order that he can replace the current crop of humanity - which he regards as trash. Aha, Mr. Koontz, I see where you got the idea!

It's a very visceral film, with much time spent staring at assorted guts and gore, and as stylish as it is, from time to time it becomes unintentionally funny thanks to a script which doesn't seem to know what it wants to do. We go from Victor Frankenstein, brilliant surgeon to Victor Frankenstein, amateur phrenologist. We also have Victor the gut-shagger who declares "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life...in the gall bladder!". This, and Victor's unhappy choice of a gay head* for his male monster, ends in disaster and the one genuinely chilling scene of the entire film, right at the very end, in which the surviving adult ends up in the hands of the eerily Addams Family/Midwich Frankenstein kids. Two kids, silent and intense for the entire film, alone, in Victor's lab, with scalpels, and a man dangling by his wrists from a crane. A situation like that...well, it just can't end well, can it?

*possibly not gay, but definitely not interested in women of any sort, even before it was removed from the original body.

#Amazonfail

2009-04-14T12:33:00.001-07:00

Most of you will have noticed the furor on Twitter, and elsewhere, which was linked to the #amazonfail tag. I don't need to describe what happened because the BBC have some reportage here.

What I'm interested in is: do we dare call it Conspiracy?

Well, no. From my position inside Tinfoil Hat Central (a bunker deep in the desert), I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

For one thing, people have a tendency to trust technology when they absolutely shouldn't. It very often does exactly what we tell it to, which is why the IT industry coined terms like PEBKAC and the infamous ID-ten-T error. It is remarkably easy to screw up even the simplest set of instructions and take out your own website. How easy? Forgetting which naming convention is important for your webserver, for one. Like if your webhost runs 'nix servers and you built your website in a Windows product, and save the opening page as "Index.html". 'nix is case sensitive, so if all the other references to your index page are for "index.html", it won't show up. It's the simplest error in the world.

Something of that magnitude, a cockup that looks like a conspiracy, happened to Amazon. I'd put money on it. Human error is so very much more likely than Amazon trying to sneak a bit of censorship past us; for one thing, it failed immediately. For another, had this been a deliberate policy by Amazon.com they must have realised on some level that they were lining themselves up for an online arse-kicking. They must have known that an issue like this wouldn't simply blow over. Right now, one imagines, they are feverishly trying to sort out whether the guy who made the goof is a malicious twat or just phenomenally unlucky.

Of course, the stigma of Conspiracy simply won't go away. People have already concluded that Amazon tried to slip a piece of grim behaviour past them and their perceptions will not be changed unless Amazon does something to placate them. The thing is, there isn't anything that Amazon can do.

If I'm right and it's a cock-up, they've already owned up to it. No more need be said.

If I'm wrong and it was the failed implimentation of a draconian anti-GLBT policy, it crashed spectacularly and there's no way they can say sorry.

My own feeling is this: no matter what the cause, support your local bookshops. Go and buy books from shops, make friends with the staff and if you have a local bookshop that isn't part of a chain, cherish it, love it and spend lots of money there. Then you won't have to worry about what Amazon are doing, a group of people you know will be more than happy to order you any book you might want to read.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Terminated?

2009-04-05T00:45:00.000-07:00

It's not hard to imagine that this show isn't going to get another season. Fox, home of misplaced Sci-Fi, is bound to have noticed that the show has failed to find an audience. This may be partly because Fox is also traditionally the home of Clueless Program Planners; if you're aware of how Monty Python railed against program planners, and how the Browncoats blame the Fox network for the death of Firefly, you might be expecting a rant about the inability of a network to give a show a good home.

Not so.

If T:TSCC is going to die, it's because it has been a bit too intelligent for it's own good. This is a conclusion I've come to after sitting through most of the last season.

During the last 20 or so episodes, we've seen John Connor grow up to realise who people think he is and what he's going to have to become in order to lead humanity's rebellion against the machines. "Future John" is a lonely, isolated person. Everyone he loves dies, generally to protect him. John has learned about who he can trust and the price he pays for trusting the wrong people.

We have seen the Connors coping with the results of their actions - and this is a bit of a first for a show like this; the premise of Terminator movies seems to be that stuff explodes, covering up the fact that the movie series asks questions about free will, the nature of intelligence, emotion and emergent behaviour. The TV series has asked similar questions, has also dabbled in fate, destiny...wyrd, in a word. More, it has stared long and hard into the repercussions of the life that the Connors lead. For example: John kills a man. Well, every hero kills sooner or later and although a hero never feels good about it, it never slows him down.

It slows John down. It grinds him to a halt. He blames his mother for his having to take a life to save hers. For a while, he hates her.

If you like your entertainment to not only make you think but to do a little thinking of it's own, then this might be the show for you.

Here's another good 'un: Sarah Connor discovers a factory apparently making Terminator type flying robots. Part of the fall-out from this discovery is a terminator stalking the factory and killing everyone in it.

The next week, rather than brush all this under the carpet and move on, we go to the funerals of all the people that died. Yes, we might discover something unsettling about the whole operation that's germane to the uberplot, but we still see a small town devastated by the loss of two dozen people.

Part of the joy that this show brings me is that it has been developing very slowly and carefully; the audience wanted it paced rather faster, but I think they might have missed the point - we're seeing John Connor undergo his last temptation and his hours in Gethsemane. Hey, I'm allowed to point out the biblical links - his initials are J.C. and he's going to save the human race by being something other than human. Not in a sci-fi way, in the most human way possible - by isolating himself from love, kindness and joy so that he can be the most effective leader and commander that he can be. There's a really good reason his best friend is a Terminator called "Cameron".

This is so worth watching, as good as Battlestar ever was, but with far less RDM-wank. People want to watch something on Friday night now the toasters are gone? They're on Fox.

The Perils of No TV

2009-04-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

I don't have a TV. I don't really miss it, other than for watching Doctor Who in full-on surround with a HOOOOJ screen.

It does mean I have to wait for a couple of days to see most of the interesting TV shows to turn up on Hulu. Some I don't get to see at all. But generally I could, often by going to the network's site for the show and catching up on stuff there.

It oh-so nearly works almost all the time.

I have had "Better Off Ted" recommended to me; it's on ABC, and is apparently something I will find funny. Since I don't mind watching ads in between American TV shows, I stroll over to ABC.com and click to see the latest show. Good! I'm only 3 eps into the season, the sample seems to play fine and shows every indication that I will enjoy the full show.

So I click. It tells me I need to install a plugin.
...
....
ok. Sure. It's a site I should be able to trust and it's going to slot into Firefox, which means I can remove it whenever I want.

It installs, I accept the usual license agreement, it shows me an advert and then errors out saying it couldn't find a decent video renderer.

Of course, it renders the ad perfectly.

It allows me to continue anyway, indicating that there really isn't a problem, and then asks me to decide between Standard and Streaming HD. Well, bearing in mind the load on the apartment complex wifi I go for standard. It buffers. For ten minutes.

While I'm waiting I have a look at Twitter (Neil Gaiman has pictures of sticks. See what you miss if you're not on Twitter?), check my mail, fire up the USEnet client and, just for fun, see if I can find Better Off Ted. Ahhhh, alt.binaries.tv has all three episodes in HD. A mere 200mb each file, too. Well, that'll take me all of about...15 minutes to download and reassemble. Half hour to watch, just in time for bed.

Moral dilemma: I don't want to condone piracy. On the other hand, I'm going to watch the pilot, ad free, and then I'm going to delete it. No, I'll just check back with the ABC movie viewer...it's exactly where I left it. Still buffering. In the same spot.

OK, a race. USEnet vs ABC.com
I leave the ABC.com viewer where it is, because that's a 30% head start, and pull the .rar files from USEnet. And, like Clarkson driving the Veyron, suddenly I'm in the grip of POWER!

It's ten minutes later. The ripped version is down, watchable and ready to go. The official, ethical version is stuck.

Odd, how people make it harder to be good than they do to be bad, isn't it?

Update: In the end, I decided to bin the downloaded file and make the ABC thing work. Tomorrow, though. Maybe. I know they're looking at TV shows watched online as part of the ratings and I would really like to see this show - but I have run out of time to watch anything fun tonight.

Work E-Mail

2009-04-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

I was having a spring clean of the "sent items" box, and found this: it needed a little reformatting.

The Original Mail:

Good Morning!!
It is not provided on init form. Can you please confirm with the EE whether he is married or single?
Thanks, Savita.

My Reaction:

Oh, the potential responses.

Version 1
Dear Savita,
Thank you for your request for clarification. I was not aware that EMR required that level of detail to set up a cost management record, so let's be exhaustive and try to provide you with as much as possible.

Mr R. remains a confirmed batchelor, although his mother hopes that this is just a phase he's going through and he'll one day Meet The Right Girl. He wears a size eleven shoe, parts his hair on the left, dresses to the right and votes based on issues rather than party affiliation or personality. He doesn't take sugar in his tea and prefers to avoid caffienated beverages where possible, but like so many of us he just can't seem to get started in the morning without at least one cup of coffee. He prefers Columbian, and whole milk. He stirs anti-clockwise, although when at home in Australia this is, of course, clockwise due to coriolis force.

Mr. R. enjoys the challenge of crosswords and has a fondness for the works of John Le Carre, the famous author of spy thrillers. He loves Christmas, which we all find very endearing in a man of his stature, having taken to heart the lesson of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" at a very early age. His favourite colour is duck-egg blue - which may be one of those peculiar decorating misnomers because I can tell you, I've studied duck eggs and one thing they aren't is blue - and he has a fondness for soft furnishings that is quite at odds with his engineering background. One might assume that he loves comfort, but in other parts of his life he's quite austere. His kitchen is particularly spartan, mostly stainless steel with only the odd wooden container to soften the impact of all that metal and recessed track lighting.

Version 2
Dear Savita,

We do not speak of Mr. R. The emotional scars are still too fresh.

Version 3
Dear Savita,

We contact Mr. R. to recover the information you requested but his response was in Australian language. We're awaiting a translation.

Version 4
Dear Savita,

Mr. R. declined to comment, but his colleague Mr. Dalliard is single and wants to know if you're available on Thursday night. He says there is a "darling little bistro" he's been wanting to try. Can we give Mr Dalliard your contact details?

Yes, I swiped Mr. Dalliard from "A Bit of Fry and Laurie", which I undersand is available on DVD.

Blog Announcement!

2009-04-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

Game: if you're commenting, and I do love it when people comment (validate me! validate me! I have no existence unless I am observed by others!), you might notice the "word verification" thing that ensures you are not a spam-bot.

At the end of your post, define the word that the verification gives you. There will be an actual prize, eventually (by Xmas, I think), for the best one. I have shamelessly stolen this idea from the blog of David Brin.

Kindles, Text to Speech and Audiobooks, oh my!

2009-03-31T07:17:00.000-07:00

Cory Doctorow wrote this in the Guardian (and turned it into a Tweet, which is how I found it), which made me think about four things at the same time -

1: That settles the Kindle issue. I'm not buying one. If I own technology, it does as I say and does not run home to mama whenever mama decides it should.

2: I'm not actually surprised that Amazon have revealed they can do this. At some point in the development of the Kindle, after the boffins and geeks had worked out what it could do they let lawyers loose on it. The lawyers saw what the Kindle could do and then proceeded to work out what it could do that they could end up in litigation over. Once they knew that, they very sensibly advised the boffins to install an "off" switch.

3: Now that we know the Kindle can have a feature disabled (by code in the e-book, I assume) it's a matter of time before someone hacks it*(. Were e-book readers interesting before?

4: Audiobooks are a separate product, at least in my mind. So someone, somewhere, is potentially misjudging the audience. If, or generally when, I buy an audiobook it's because I want to hear the book being read by a specific voice. After an appalling experience with an audio version of "Ender's Game" I was reconverted by the performance - best way to describe it - of "Coraline" by Neil Gaiman. How cool, to have the author read his own work?

I would pay really quite a lot of money to hear an interesting voice read an interesting book, but I will pay no money to have a machine read to me. I want the performance, not just the sound.

Now, admittedly, there is something to be addressed about some people being unable to read a print edition, for whatever reason, and therefore buying an audiobook as a replacement for a print copy or e-edition; the kindle would cut down on that market. Audiobooks tend to be more expensive because of production costs, one assumes.

*wait...let me leap to a conclusion. If the Kindle runs code that interacts with hardware, and that code is based in the e-book, how long before the e-book reader becomes a target for malware of some kind? What sort of malware would a Kindle attract? Adware, one assumes, or if the Kindle connects with a PC it might be an vector for getting code past the normal defenses.

And if i've thought of it, I'm sure someone else will.

What If? - Pinecones.

2009-03-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

A comment engendered by Lucy's post "Yesterday" -

- Pinecones do not exist for us to observe them, we exist so that there can be pinecones. The job of humanity is to observe. We do not own, we are not the master of the world, we are the servant of What Might Be, making the world moment to moment so that all the wonderful things that might be in it have a chance to exist.

Shoe Disaster

2009-03-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

I've known it was coming for a while, but today my two pairs of much loved work shoes - suede slip on things that cost about $10 each, both died. They were starting to go at the back, the uppers parting company with the soles, and that's exactly what happened in it's entirety today. To both.

I have a pair of emergency work shoes, and a pair of desert combat boots, but these are stop-gaps. I needed to bite the bullet and buy some shoes. I chose to do so online. Thanks to a remarkably unstable wifi connection, it took an hour.

I noticed a couple of things: for a desert, Arizona is remarkably keen on boating and deck shoes. It's also keen on "board shoes" which appear to be for surfing in. There are lakes here, where one could yacht if one so chose, but there is no surf, no snow. Perhaps these are skateboarding shoes.

Secondly, there are no interesting shoes for men. This is a rant in itself, one that I shall post another time, but the really interesting thing is that the shoes there are have either staid and sensible names or really aggressive and macho ones.

Sometimes, they are named after cars.

They are also expensive. Very expensive. So I have bought cheap shoes, because 'pon my return to the UK I shall be buying Docs and shoes made of concrete to keep out the weather. However, American shoes are marketed on the assumption that all men in America have laughably small genitalia.

Seriously! Marketers the country over think that American men all need help asserting their masculinity. This is why the cars are big, why some of them are called "muscle cars" (and it ain't the biceps they're talking about), why the handguns come in everything from .22 to fifty-cal (and anything less than a .38 is "for girls"), why the steaks are huge and why the beer is weak (so you can drink lots and look like a Real Man without killing your liver in one night).

I know a few American men. Not that well, because I'm English and therefore after seven years I am only half way through the "casual nods at a distance" process of getting to know people, but well enough to know that by any sensible measure of manliness they're definitely owners of a Y chromosome. They aren't Hemmingway, but then who is?

Rend! Tear! Fold! Spindle!

2009-03-28T20:58:00.000-07:00

I have been sans-internet since this afternoon.

It's back now, because someone nearby is incautious with their very slow, very weak wireless connection. If I knew how to leave a note saying "dude, WEP key at least!" I would.

I think I have entirely failed to tweet, because when everything fell over I was setting up Twitter. Conspiracy? I think it might be.

On the plus side, I cooked roast beef. On the minus side, I have been moping. I am going to flip this thing over to Ubuntu, listen to some Doctor Who audio and attempt to be Zen - although we already know I am to Zen what Prince Phillip is to International Diplomacy.

Damn you, BSG, Damn you!!!

2009-03-26T14:33:00.001-07:00

I can't get "All Along The Watchtower" out of my head.

...this was possibly more a Tweet than a blog entry.

The Lifeboat

2009-03-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

I'm in an odd place; one of the things I am planning to do this year is return to the UK and find somewhere to live. This means that I need to think about packing and the extortionate costs of shipping goods across the Atlantic. If I were more Zen about this, I would be casting aside as many posessions as possible and just turning up with a suitcase.

It turns out I am less than Zen, because of my ongoing book addiction.

While I have steeled myself to not buying any more new books, something that grates at my nerves daily, and while I have steeled myself against buying new things generally, I still have a small collection - perhaps a couple of dozen books - that I cannot bear to be parted from. I now face the unhappy choice of deciding which ones come with me...and which ones don't.

I toyed, briefly, with the idea of putting up some kind of poll and letting other people help me decide. Then I decided that would be far too callous. These aren't people, these are books, they're important. Also, I can't ask people to decide on something so personal unless they have the same relationship with said books that I do. So it really comes down to me making the final cut.

This is an aspect of the final move I am really not looking forward to. It's odd, too, because of all the roots I should have put down in the last seven years this is the biggest wrench. This is the one that's difficult. Moreover, it's like a little window into mortality. At some time in the next...ooo...seventy* years or so someone else is going to have to go through my book collection and sort out what they want to keep, and what to throw away, and probably make little "tsk tsk" noises at my fondness for British fantasists with comedic tendencies. My bet is that they will box up the dusty tomes and ship them off to an Old Folks Home where people still enjoy print as opposed to reading things via direct retina projection (ooo - can we call the interface the iBall?) or having them channelled directly into their CNS.

*a wildly optimistic ballpark figure. If I get through today alive I will be impressed.

The End of Battlestar Galactica

2009-03-21T20:57:00.000-07:00

For the record, I enjoyed it.

I had to watch it, you don't miss that sort of thing. I wanted to find out how it was all going to be resolved.

Satisfyingly, I think.

Although I have no doubt that somewhere in the next six months to a year someone will point out to Ronald D Moore that all of that ending has happened before, most recently I think by Douglas Adams.

All is forgiven, though, for the fate of Starbuck (he's already catching a lot of flack for that, and I think Moore should shrug it off and keep going) because sometimes you don't get all the answers, and that's OK.

Look, if Battlestar can borrow an ending from DNA, I can borrow a line from Moffat.

Plus, the show wins for the final look at the eventual fate of the colonials and playing out with the tune that has haunted the series for a while.

On that note, it's probably time I called it a day here too. I think I would prefer to play out, like H2G2, with Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World."

glædmód

2009-03-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

It's Olde Englishe and it means "cheerful".

I thought it was worth recording here because the way it's constructed makes me see glædmód as "glad mode".

Which I like.

Glad Mode. I have engaged it.

I never know how to deal with things like this, hence the rambly title

2009-03-13T05:45:00.000-07:00

Last night, my old house was on the news.

Tangentally.

Across the road from us lived an older couple; he was retired and not in the best of health, but he - let's call him Fred - had an interest in reading and was generally a very genial man. My soon-to-be- Ex and I had dinner with them, chatted often. Fred's wife is a nurse, so we never saw much of her.

Last night, their house burned down. Fred was inside it at the time.

The house is just gone and the local news said that the Fire Department were suspicious about the cause of the blaze, the severity of it.

Fred, and I've changed his name because no one who reads this could possibly know him and I don't want the family to find this on Google somewhere, was a nice guy. He read a lot, he chatted endlessly but well, he had a lot to share. He was a good neighbor. I have missed him, in small ways, since I moved out.

My thoughts are, of course, with his wife; she has lost more than I can comprehend and I wish there was something I could do, something meaningful, that would help. Blogging seems so empty and futile, but, I think it needs saying: he was a good man, a good neighbor and I shall miss him.

Teach Me 'ow To Be King?

2009-03-12T18:20:00.000-07:00

According to this it seems that NBC are planning to show Merlin, the BBC Merlin, in a primetime-ish slot.

This could be interesting. I wonder if the suits have seen it, or whether they are hoping it will turn out to be a bit Harry Potter, rather than a bit homoerotic.

I still haven't seen it, so the homoerotic comments stem from the comments of people who have. Either way, it's nice to see the Yanks catching on to "just show the Brit version!", so perhaps Life on Mars didn't die for nothing.

Retrospectively speaking

2009-03-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

There's a lot to catch up on, I'm sure.

Firstly, I has New Blog called "Jingoistic Claptrap" which I will post stuff on from time to time that don't belong here. It will be of a fictional and possibly even satirical nature.

Second, having decided to take a break from a few sites and recover my enthusiasm, it turns out that I don't miss most of them. I'm a little bit worried about that. If I retreat any further into my shell, I will end up being all shell.

Thirdly, I still don't have anything interesting to say.

Which isn't strictly true. The looming divorce isn't as looming as it was due to a shortfall in finance - divorce being costly - but is still on course for this year. I want out, just to get it over with and be able to move on. It won't be pleasant to be a statistic, being one of the 50%, but I can live with it. I've been a statistic all my life. I'll continue to be one after I'm dead, somewhere, which is an odd sort of immortality.

I haven't written anything worth reading in far too long, which is really ticking me off. But starting 16th March I have a week off and have decided to see if I can't re-fire the creative bits by actually finishing that Time War stuff, and one or two other things I had in the works.

I'm reasonably enthused about that. As much as I am enthused about anything at the moment.

I Think I Might Be Evil.

2009-03-04T13:10:00.001-08:00

Only "might", because having seen the opportunity to do something potentially very evil I restrained myself.

One of the blogs I follow is currently displaying a post from a self-admittedly germophobe complaining about the preponderance of colds and the like.

Seeing this, the first thing that occurred to me was "I could sabotage this poor fool by telling him all about his keyboard". The thing about keyboards is that even if you take reasonable care to keep them clean, they still collect all the Yuck that positively sleets off the human body. And then Things grow in it. Terrible, infectious things that then plaster themselves to your skin just waiting for the slightest nick, the merest puncture, to facilitate their invasion and your transformation into a mass of suppurating agony.

Being part Shoggoth* I'm largely immune to human diseases, so the subject is one that provides much entertainment for me. A more evil chuckle still would have arisen from well meaning but deliberately misleading advice on the art of cleaning and disinfecting a keyboard. There are cleaning products available that will devour the average keyboard, leaving the poor blogger with a clean but non-functional input device and no way to express his or her rage.

I didn't, though.

For Good to triumph all that is required is for Evil men to feel a bit "meh".

*it's complicated, and you shouldn't ask because the answers will blast your sanity. It should be enough that you remember my middle names are "Squamous" and "Rugose". This is also why people sometimes think I'm Irish.

Mr. Ebert, what have you done?

2009-03-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

Roger Ebert is a greatly respected movie critic, an erudite chap and, more to the point, a good read.

He transgressed one of the Laws of the Internet recently. Thou Shalt Not Mock The Nerds is a good rule to operate by when online - not that you have anything to fear, but if you Mock then you can expect to have your inbox slowly fill up with hate-spam. There is no rage like nerd-rage.

Mr. Ebert has contributed to the stereotyping of a section of society that he feels are lacking.
The belittling of a social group because of a choice of self identification is wrong. If the group he were talking down to had made public their sexual, gender, ethnic or religious identity, we'd be looking at a lawsuit. Not from the individual, but surely a pressure group would have stepped in by now.

Ebert feels safe because fandom doesn't have teeth. IGetting fans to agree on anything is like nailing jelly to a ceiling.

If I were feeling spikey, I would suggest that writing a deft, pithy, entertaining review isn't a license to Other people.

Which is what he's attempted to do.

Suggesting that fans are in a cultural "dead end", that their Otaku collection and mastery of trivia, and their social ineptness makes them lesser. No one has to worry about offending them, they have no pride, they have no lives and to stand up to answer back is to invite ridicule. As long as everyone is reasonably sure it's not a variant of Autism.

He says that being a Fan these days is more about celebrating yourself, and that fans talk in quotes.

When Fandom talks in scripts, talks in quotes, what's really happening? Ebert talks about not having to ad-lib, but how much human conversation is ad-lib anyway?

Not much.

Think about the conversations you've had today. When we meet an acquaintance, what happens? We ask how that person is. If you're interested in Hacking the language when someone asks you how you are, tell them. Go for it. They probably didn't want to know about your incipient cold or the state of your love life - and oh god, the looks you get when you do enumerate the things that are wrong with you. You strayed from the path and now the conversation is deep in bandit country.

Conversation is a dying art, we're told, but it's really important to know who you're talking to and what it's safe to talk about so that you keep that vital social acceptance. It's built into Americans in High School, I imagine the same thing happens in other cultures at roughly the same time - as you construct your identity during your teens you also set patterns that will follow you for the rest of your life, patterns that are comfortable and safe, patterns that allow you to ask the question "are you like me?" of everyone you meet. If you want to call it tribal, or clannish, you can.

So why is it bad?

It's not. It's low tech RFID, social GPS. The main reason that Roger doesn't like 'em is that he doesn't like the source. If you can weave Kipling, Keats, Shakespeare, Milton, Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Russell, Marx (Karl and Groucho alike) into conversation you're Educated. You might even be Urbane and Witty. But dropping Lucas, Roddenberry, Spielberg, Snyder, Davies or Moffat, Moore or Whedon into a conversation makes you a hopeless fanboy, one of the Morlocks.

I have the distinct impression that this isn't going to change. A prejudice is hard to shake off, and by the time the works of people like Alan Moore are being spoken of in the same context as Wells and Verne, Roger Ebert and I will probably be long dead.

Author! Author!

2009-02-22T10:44:00.000-08:00

Mand suggested that a post of author recommendations might be a good idea. So here's a non-exhaustive list in no particular order.

China Mieville. Start with King Rat and work your way into Perdido Street Station. It's fantasy-steampunkishness for grown-ups.
Jon Courtney Grimwood has done some fascinating sci-fi, some alternate history world building, and is well worth a look. My own favourites include Remix and Red Robe.
Robert Rankin is the master of Far Fetched Fiction, a man who has turned an evening in a pub with your esoteric mates into a collection of novels. He deserves a lot more attention. And money.
Joe Haldeman wrote The Forever War which is a Must Read, one of those rare books that everyone should read regardless of whether you like science fiction. It's a superb example of a really human story in a scifi setting that uses the genre to excellent effect whilst never really betraying the human elements of the story. The rest of his work is equally interesting.
Robert A. Heinlein seems, in many of his novels, to be an arch conservative. But over the years I have come to appreciate him as a teacher. I often get the impression that he wrote books that said "here's my idea, now argue against me". Particularly important are Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, which use science fiction as a way to make points about the responsibilities of citizenship and the ways in which we treat relationships.
John Sladek wrote some of the darkest, funniest novels I have ever read. Humour does not come blacker, or more twisted, and he was a very under-rated author. If you can find Tik Tok buy it, read it, enjoy it, then collect the rest of whatever you can find in print. He'd been dead since 2000, so it's really a race against time to grab what you can before it all goes out of print.
Tom Holt is another great British comic-novelist, but once you've sampled something like Flying Dutch go on to read Olympiad and his earlier, serious works. Tom Holt is also One Of The Good Guys.
Jasper Fforde is another of Britain's crop of humourists, but one bursting with strange and entertaining ideas. His books come with DVD extras, which you can find on the website.
David Gemmell was a fantasy author, an excellent spinner of tales, and wrote some of the best heroic fantasy since Tolkein. Read Legend and tell me I'm wrong.
Thomas M. Disch was identified as a leading light of the New Wave, a movement I really enjoyed. Alas, he too has been taken from us but he leaves a legacy of excellent and challenging fiction.
Terry Pratchett is a lot more than just a humourist. The most recent batch of Discworld books demonstrates that. There's more to Going Postal and Making Money, or Monstrous Regiment than fantasy laffs and funny dialog, and the joy of the Discworld series is that, start to finish, it's a timeline of a style and form.
Alfred Bester is another terribly important writer that people don't seem to have heard of, which is a shame. He's really good, and terribly clever.
Christopher Priest is someone else who should be read. A lot. A lot more.

And this is now leaning on the long side for a blog post. Who have I left out? Everyone else. People like David Brin and Neil Gaiman, like Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury, like Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Anton Wilson, Charles Stross and David Langford. I left out Michael Moorcock (but that's OK because this list is a sort of tribute to passages in the Cornelius novels, I'll slip a Hawkwind reference in soon) and C.S. Lewis, I omitted E.E. "Doc" Smith and completely missed Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which is as unforgivable as missing H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne and Mary Gentle .

In fact, I've entirely failed to cover so many it's almost criminal. So remind me who I have missed and who is worth reading. Genre or not. It's what the comments are for, really. And here we stop, because lists are like roads - if you let them, they go ever, ever on.

Hurm

2009-02-20T23:18:00.000-08:00

I have of late, and wherefore I know not, lost all urge to visit Facebook, post on Outpost Wrinklie or go much of anywhere else other than assorted blogs.

I don't really have all that much to say at the moment.
Nor am I in much of a mood to wade through a dozen threads of sameness.

So why do I feel like a bad person because of it?

Invaders Must Die!

2009-02-20T23:04:00.000-08:00

I bought a CD. I was inspired to buy the CD because I haven't in aaaaages. Alas, it was not by an exciting new band.

It was The Prodigy.

And this is the world's worst music review.

Look, it's like a Greatest Hits album without actually being a compilation of The Prodigy's greatest hits. It might be a distillation of what made The Prodigy really good. The smart reviewers and people who know about this sort of music will tell you that things have moved on since Fat of the Land and this sort of thing is a bit...old news. On the other hand it's very definitely The Prodigy, and it's really good. You can tell, because I bought it. I don't like this kind of music, in general, but there's something about Liam, Keith et al that keeps me fascinated and entertained, dammit, and I really can't say that about many other bands.

Dave Grohl apparently guest-drums on Run With The Wolves, not that I could tell (because I have the musical talent of a wellington boot with tinitus).

But, look, I sampled a couple of the tracks prior to buying and liked what I heard. Then I listened to the whole thing. Twice. It made my head bounce and I smiled a lot.

Plus, I love the title. So, to sum up: it's The Prodigy, only moreso, and if you like that sort of thing then you'll definitely like this. And if you don't, then you probably won't. But if you aren't sure and the last thing you heard from this lot was Firestarter then you should find a way to listen to some of it because you might end up smiling, bouncing your head around and buying the CD.

Now, if you'll excuse me I want to go back and listen to Run With The Wolves again. I'm not entirely sure what Keith is going on about, but I can't get the drums out of my head.

Technical Hitches

2009-02-18T20:47:00.000-08:00

I got myself a copy of Ubuntu 8.10, because it was free (and I like that in an operating system).

I tested it, booting Ubuntu from CD, and my aging PC was suddenly given a new lease of life. I can see why people like Linux. I had a scoot around, loved the fact that it seemed simple and responsive, and tried to get online. Nope. Fail.

Boot to Windows XP. Read the help forums. Oh bugger.

It seems that Ubuntu has issues with older wireless cards and the only internet connection I have is wifi. I don't have a choice about that; in this complex it's wifi or nothing. So I read some more.

I've got an older Broadcom card, which is perfectly servicable under Windows but isn't supported by the Ubuntu kernel. There are workarounds, however. I have investigated some. It's been a while since I last used a command line for anything important but it's not intimidating, it's just a pain in the bum to do. So after much reading, it turns out that in order to make this work I need to find drivers, extract vital bits of them, tarball them, rebuild them, run them up a flagpole and dance the Charleston on the night of the full moon.

I am now officially intimidated, but I go ahead and repartition my drive, install Ubuntu and have a bit of a think.

The pain is that with the card offline in Ubuntu I need to keep switching back and forward to Windows in order to research things and spend any time online. I can't get WINE, the Ubuntu windows emulator, because I need to be online to download it and install it. I also don't appear to be terribly good at sorting out documents without links.

So this leads me to a couple of conclusions.

1: I have some learning to do. I reckon that if I can master this it'll be the most challenging thing I have done in ages and if it works I have a lovely Ubuntu partition to play with.

2: The Open Source community is full of really intelligent people. Some of them have brains that are big. I, on the other hand, am a total n00b and the thought bothers me a bit.

3: I should have waited until I was somewhere with an ethernet connection in order to do this. Then wifi wouldn't be an issue.

4: When I go to the UK, I will be buying a laptop and installing Ubuntu, so I either need to get this right now or else sacrifice the wifi capability of said future lappy. And I don't see a point in doing that.

In the end, Ubuntu is going to force me to learn it anyway. It's not like Windows, which does so many things for you that it causes brain atrophy, and it's not as forgiving an environment as Windows, so this isn't going to be easy, but I refuse to be beaten. At some point in the near future there will be a victory post from the Ubuntu partition and I will sing the praises of the software, but between now and then there's going to be a lot of reading.

Insomnia TV again

2009-02-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

No actual insomnia was involved, just the President's Day weekend and some time to settle back and watch a few shows.

Fringe becomes more interesting as time goes on. In the last episode, we find out why Olivia was kidnapped and given a spinal-tap, and Walter reveals that he made a teleporter but never used it because it does something hideous to those who use it. We learn a bit more about The Pattern and the group known as ZFT.

Remember Doctor Who? Remember The Army of Ghosts, and the ill-fated experiments atop the Torchwood tower? Remember The Doctor's awful warning about what happens when universes collide? Yeah. But subtler.

The show is successfully wading into X-Files territory, but in a much less mythos-bound manner than the X-Files did. It's probably going to build into something along similar lines to the backstory which Lost glories in, but since there's very little to catch up on at the moment, it's a good time to get involved with Fringe.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles returns with a very interesting episode; we were left with Sarah and Riley's lives hanging by threads, uncertain who would live or die, and not at all sure how to react to those developments. The show undercuts one set of tensions by sidelining Riley and concentrating on Sarah. I suppose that's fair, she's the one the show is named after.

Sarah has some trust issues, as you might expect, so the episode focusses on giving her someone she needs to trust - after being shot, Sarah escapes her hospital bed, kidnaps a doctor at gunpoint and then demands that the doctor treat her injury. To complicate matters, she's seeing John Connor's father - Kyle Reese, the soldier the adult John sent back to protect his mother in the original Terminator. Reese seems to represent the rational and more trusting part of Sarah Connor, which died right along with him at the end of the first movie. As Sarah connects with the woman she has kidnapped, the events of the first two movies are related in dialog - but not in exposition, it's nice to see - leading the doctor to assume that Sarah is the victim of an abusive relationship. This is subtle, well done, and nicely played by the cast.

Meanwhile, Sarah and the doctor are hunted by a cop, played by Connor Trinneer whom I last saw blowing himself up in Enterprise. His character seems very experienced, competent, intelligtent and in control. It's only when we reach the denoumont that we find out all is not as it seems, and there's a nice little sting in the tale.

The sub-plots - Riley being co-erced into tempting John away from his Terminator bodyguard, and the ongoing efforts of Agent Ellis to teach an A.I. (which looks increasingly like a nascent SkyNet) morality, are present and correct. The latter enjoys the considerable charms of Shirely Manson who, in this episode, gets to committ a little mayhem and delivers another porcelain performance - chilling, inhuman and yet somehow sensual. Manson has considerable charisma; when she's on screen, it's hard not to watch her.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is well worth finding and watching.

Dollhouse is Joss Whedon's latest and proceeds from an interesting premise. Take a person and wipe their personality and memories. You would then be free to implant any other personality or set of memories on them, turning them into anyone with any skillset.

You might think that this would be prime government conspiracy fodder, but Whedon sets The Dollhouse up as an illegal commercial enterprise instead. Eliza Dushku is our lead, a character called Echo who is recruited by the Dollhouse with the promise that after five years of service all her past problems will be made to go away.

The next time we see her, she's been transformed into someone's perfect date for the express purpose of finding out how much fun can be had in a weekend.

Should we be comfortable with this? Echo, as far as we can see, is a slave. Between Engagements she's well looked after and cared for, but by the end of the show we see her being put away in what's essentially a box. The moral ambiguity is flagged early on; one of the characters is a former cop who is cautioned against engaging in heroics - Engagements happen on a strictly professional basis - but the Dollhouse reduces the people it sends out to the status of puppets and commodities. Without a personality imprint to motivate her, Echo is a cipher and nothing more.

The idea of someone acquiring skills and/or memories to make them essentially a different person isn't new - see also Joe 90 and The Pretender for variations on the theme - but Dollhouse is the first time we've been asked to take a look at the morality of programming people and changing identities. The opening episode is engaging enough, but doesn't deliver a big enough punch to hook a big audience. Eliza Dushku's performance alone - and this is a great role for her because week to week she's going to be able to showcase her versatility - is worth watching but again, it's not enough to make this a hit. I hope it gets to run a full season, I don't think it will be back for a second, I desperately hope I'm wrong.

Incidentally, none of these are a patch on Being Human.

I'd write about Heroes but I want to see another episode before I comment.

For those who are wondering how I manage to watch this stuff without the benefit of a TV, I've signed up with a service called Hulu which uses adverts to support itself and has a decent back-catalog of material, including agreements to show new material (like Fringe, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes) for a limited time starting the day or week after they are broadcast. There are the usual buffering issues, which you'll find on any online service of this nature, but it's simple to use and easy to navigate. So I thought it was worth a plug, because some of the content might be available to UK users. Someone let me know if it's been Geo-Locked.

Awesome Thought of the Week

2009-02-09T21:31:00.000-08:00

Not being a Christian, this would never have occurred to me, but it did occur to Becca and she passed it on.

In the Bible, John 1:1 says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

- which might argue that all of creation is a text, and that those of us who have been trained to examine texts might be in a rather more startling position than we had previously believed.

If the universe is a text, if it can be approached as a text and understood as a text, then it can be interpreted and changed like a text.

Think on.

Books vs Internet/Digital text

2009-02-09T15:12:00.000-08:00

I was reading the dotLife blog, over on the BBC website, at lunchtime, and the question was asked: Do you still read books?

Of course I do. I post there as Dark Side of the Goon (an online name which happily combines the geniuses of Spike Milligan and Roger Waters). Here's what I said:

The book still has advantages over electronics.

For example, if I decide to read in the bath, I can. If I drop the paperback, I'm out a tenner. If I drop a Kindle, it's a lot harder to replace.

Books don't have batteries. They work in power cuts and in places where there wasn't any power to begin with.

They don't overheat. A publisher will never send one out with a faulty battery that explodes. You don't have to worry about a book getting a virus or just failing to work altogether for no obvious reason (unless you're the author).

Your book will never decide to update itself and then autonomously restart when you're in the middle of something important. It won't go "bing!" at you because it suddenly doesn't like the page you've arrived at. And no matter how many times you riffle through the index, it will not surprise you with porn as the result of what you assumed was a perfectly innocent search. Unless it was that sort of book to start with.

Also, books are more or less DRM-proof. I bought a book, I own the book. I can always write things in the margins if I feel like it.

We're coded for books, programmed for them. No matter how digital we go, books are part of the language. The police will never .doc a criminal. At the trial, the judge will never throw the .pdf at him. Being brought to Kindle has some rather Inquisitorial associations and you'll never place a bet with a .txtmaker.

I think the book is probably safe for now.

Bothersome

2009-02-08T19:31:00.000-08:00

I'm attempting an exorcism.

I have been stuck in the same job for three years. Doing the same things. This is anathema to me. I have attempted to extend my role in every possible direction, taking on the things that other people don't want to do, pushing the envelope as much as I can in line with the stated vision for my job title. But enough is enough, I wanted some new challenges and a chance to learn new things. So I applied for a similar job with a different department, because it would give me new people to hang out with and infovore off.

The interview did not go well. When I described my current role and what I had done with it, the interviewer recoiled and told me that the job he was offering was nowhere near that complex or demanding, that I would be bored and never challenged and that, essentially, I was too smart to do the job.

Which would be a lovely compliment if the job wasn't also a promotion AND a pay rise.

So, essentially, some cow-eyed numpty with less responsibility than me, with less brain than me, with a less complex understanding of the company than me, gets better paid and better opportunity to be promoted.

I don't quite understand the logic there.

Never mind. It's just a job. I need to write more and make that my career instead.

It's been a while...

2009-02-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

I had two days with no internet connection, thanks to dodgy wifi.
It was the router. Not my router - I don't have a router - it was the router for the back half of the complex. I am House-like in my ability to diagnose small networking issues.

Sans internet, I have been reading and catching up on a few things. Also, I have reformatted my MP3 player and added new stuff.

All in all, a busy couple of days.

I have read: Women in the Middle Ages by Frances and Joseph Gies.

I have a series of their books, which I find really easy to read. They have an engaging style; in this case they focus on a series of women from the 900s to the 1500s, taking a look at the lives of women from queens to peasants and covering all the variations in between. Margery Kempe pops up - my favourite religious nutter - because as well as representing women who make their spirituality their lives she was also quite the entrepreneur at a time when women were not supposed to be. F&J also rely quite heavily on material culled from primary source docs, which is always a favourite thing of mine in a history text, and they have a way of finding the small joys involved in people's lives. They also explain quite a lot about where all their information comes from, so you get a decent picture of how it all worked.

The end result is a clear picture that what we think we know about women from 960 onwards is probably wrong. It turns out that although the male chroniclers of the times might have tried to downplay women, they were as important and involved in the world then as they are now.

I have been watching: All kinds of things.

I got the Shakespeare Retold DVD set (thanks Becca!) and have consumed it. After having watched most of it - there are four plays in the set and I have seen three - I wrote some stuff about it intending to put it up on this here blog as one post. Instead, edited highlights.

Like everyone else in the UK my first exposure to Shakespeare was at school and, like everyone else, I found his plays hard going. At first.
After seeing Star Wars, it was actually hard to imagine a world without special effects that could bring the imaginings of the writer to life, but after reading Julius Caeser and Henry V, I realised what it was that Shakespeare was doing. The man had no technology to wow the crowds, no special effects to bring his scenes to life - all he had were words. So he used them.

If you're going to be slapped around the face by the power of language, there are few better ways to do it than with Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Retold gives you another way to look at the Bard. Like many of the great writers in the English language - well, like many of the great writers - he tells a story. In the Shakespeare Retold series, the writers have the unenviable task of throwing away the language (for the most part) and working with the characters and structure of the plays, modernising them, bringing them firmly into the 21st century and making them accessible to an audience that might not have that love of language.

It is not an enviable task. Shakespeare is still The Man.

What this collection of short films does is reaffirm that his plays stand the test of time; they can be translated, updated, re-written and the structure remains sound, the stories remain entertaining and vital. Hollywood is still strip-mining The Bard for ideas and occasionally his plays appear in unexpected forms, as teen comedies, as buddy movies. It's rare these days to see a Shakespeare being told in the original form, but it doesn't matter because do what we may, the stories refuse to lay down and die.

McBeth, for example, no longer has a castle and there are no Scottish kings here. Instead James MacAvoy plays Joe McBeth the chef, a Michelin starred chef toiling in the kitchen of the restaraunt owning celebrity chef Duncan. Duncan is king of his domain, right enough, but it's McBeth who puts him there and keeps him there. The terrible, awful downward spiral of Joe McBeth makes compelling viewing; from brilliance to ambition to murder, to his tortured guilty fall, the story is as relentless as a war drum. That all of this takes place in a kitchen and draws us into a world of TV chefs and the very finest cuisine while still being visceral and powerful is a tribute to the cast and writer, but you can't ignore the production team. There's a lot of shadow around; MCBeth emerges from darkness like some predatory fish breaking the surface of a moonlit sea. The contrasts between the stark, steel kitchen and those times when McBeth and his wife are alone, when the lighting becomes soft and subtle, are wonderful. The camera takes every opportunity to showcase MacAvoy, who gives a wonderfully physical performance without falling to the temptation to chew the scenery. It's compelling stuff, and very much recommended.

A Midsummer Night's Dream has adaptation issues. The play is about love, magic and faeries, and it's set in Athens. So the adaptation plants it firmly in Center Parks, keeps both the magic and the faeries and sticks closely enough to the events and characters that if you know the play you'll see clearly that the writer kept all the important bits, although he played with a couple of characters. Peter Quince and Bottom, notably, have changed. Here we get Johnny Vegas as Bottom; gone is the bombastic man full of his own importance and certain of his rather uncertain talents and instead he is replaced with a classic of British culture - the comedic Northern Loser. Peter Quince, on the other hand, takes on the role of arrogant blowhard. It works, largely thanks to casting Vegas and (the bloke from the Fast Show who played Monkfish). Demetrius and Hermia, Helena and Lysander remain unaltered, although Bill Paterson and Imelda Staunton get to play a rather older Theseus and Hippolita who have already been married for some years and are on the edge of splitting up. Oberon and Titania quarrel, but over who's in charge rather than an Indian page boy, and Puck is...

...well, Puck is Dean Lennox Kelly. It's a rather more modern Puck than we're used to but DLK unviels the core of the character. Puck is a mischievous creature, and the core of mischief is malice. Puck torments humans because they are stupid and easy to mess with. He loves it. At one point, as Oberon attempts to get things set right, he warns Puck that no one is to get hurt. The result of Puck's machinations is a brawl. DLK turns to the camera and with a smile says
"Oberon's got this 'no one gets hurt' thing going, but I wanted to see a punch-up and you wanted to see a punch up..and, come on!"
He's also a big user of natural recreational chemicals, commenting at one point that his night has been far too busy and he's "off to pick a load of mushrooms, have a big brew-up and get a bit of a wobble on", which accounts for his inability to get things right. He also, as in the play, gets the last word, commenting
"You might be offended. Some people get offended, no reason. If you were offended, I can come round to your place and sort you out. I'm not lying."
If it weren't for the pleasant smile on DLK's face, if not for his slightly fuzzy, slightly dazed Rave Casualty demeanour, you might feel threatened. You should feel threatened. Puck's a bastard.

I still need to watch Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew, so more on that score when I get to them.

...and...more, generally, later.

Won't get fooled again (waaaaaaaaoooooooo!)

2009-01-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

There has been a reorganisation at work, and us dumb grunts are blinking in the light of day and staring up at the faces of our latest batch over overlords.

Bossa nova similis bossa seneca, as The Who would have said if they sang in nearly-latin.

Except this time there was a tiny ray of light.

One of the bosses said "This new software we're rolling out, that we've said will solve everything? Well, it won't. Not everything."

Which is, in terms of comedy, the bit where Rowan Atkinson (in his guise as Edmund Blackadder) stops, looks worried and says "Ah." In that way that he does when the cunning plan starts to fall apart.

This might not seem like much to anyone else, but it's a big step for the managment. Here's why:

We shall call the software the Worldwidfe Stuff Deliverer, which is nothing like the real TLA but will suffice for now. WSD has been hailed as the solution to all our problems, problems which stem from an uneven IT strategy which can best be described as "Ooo! Shiny! We can make this work with everything else, right?" Eventually, someone got the senior leadership their ritalin and things calmed down, and they made the terribly brave move to scrap their previous plans for universal domination via 57 competing apps and settle on one - WSD.

WSD was marketed to us, the peons who will have to use it, as a Magickal Unicorn that will fart rainbows over our desks. We were wary; we have been promised unicorns before and they have turned out to be either intractable camels or irritated wolverines. Those who pointed out the lack of Unicorns were taken away and crushed to death between the pages of a very large book. Those of you wanting to know where all the props went from the 60s Batman TV series now know.

For the current batch of managers and leaders to admit, however tacitly, that WSD is not a Magic Unicorn and that whatever it might turn out to be it is unlikely to fart rainbows is a vast step forward. We now understand that all is not entirely Bowie Album in the world of Manager. This makes me feel vastly better about my sorry existence, and now I have reason to smirk.

The even better reason to smirk was the expressions on the faces of the line managers, who were all dressed up. Watching the "I'm a happy associate manager, please don't eliminate my grade" smiles crack as the senior leaders sent the "Houston, we don't have a Magic Unicorn" message was an absolute delight. The thing is, they have so much more to lose than me, right now (because if I am made redundant I will cobble together money and disappear back to the UK poste-haste), and I new there wasn't going to be desks littered with rainbow farts from the inception of the project. I've done these things, they're never simple. But they haven't, and they didn't know, and now they're worried.

And though it blacken my soul forever, I'm glad about that.

Important Announcement.

2009-01-24T21:05:00.000-08:00

Lucy McGough has an announcement which I believe affects us all.

Go read it.

President Obama

2009-01-20T21:08:00.000-08:00

I'm breaking in a new keyboard. Please forgive the spelling errors or odd typos.

I sat through most of the Inaugural address, even though I was at work. My company streamed it to our desktops. Oh brave new world, and all that.

I listened with the cynical ear of a Yerpie that has listened to too many politicians, and one that saw all the hopes we had for Labour fall apart, and I did a lot of grinning. Yes, Obama said a lot of nice things; he mentioned a return to diplomacy, a willingness to treat other cultures with respect, a desire to put science at the forefront of education, a reminder to the world that you still don't mess with the United States and expect no response, and a dozen other things.

He spoke about the need to grow up and face a world in which we can't always have what we want and in which we have to think about where the cornucopia is drawing it's bounty from. He spoke about fortitude, about the great strength of America which lies not in guns or missiles, or even in technology, but in the will of its people to do what is right. He reminded the American people that with that will, nothing is beyond their reach.

At about this point, my literary radar (my wordy-sense, if you prefer) started pinging away like mad.

President Obama was shifting gears between lofty rhetoric and simple, plain terms with ease. He was speaking to everyone at the same time. As Kipling said

"If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;"

then you have a simply magnificent speach writer, and President Obama does.

His name is Jon Favreau, he's 27, he's the youngest chief writer in Whitehouse history and the President refers to him as his "mindreader". Between them, they seem to have constructed a piece of rhetoric that is destined to go down in history. How it is remembered is for time to decide, but it lit all sorts of happy lights in my word-loving heart and, even as the message was driven home by the President's presentational skills, I realised that the days of stumbling Gerorge W and his overabundance of Common Touch were gone.

History will judge President Obama; we've had the words and the deeds are yet to come, but I can't help feeling a sense of optimism and joy. We have a man in the White House who loves words as much as I do. All of a sudden, I look forward to the State of the Union address.

Battlestar Galactica - worth the wait?

2009-01-19T09:47:00.000-08:00

It's been so long since the last episode that I had almost forgotten what BSG was like.

Luckily, within fifteen minutes the show put me firmly back on my BSG-feet.

It is dirge. There is no hope, no light, no joy and no cause for optimism in this entire series. Everything is broken.

The reason I still watch is, of course, that it's really really well done. Compelling, in fact. I could wax lyrical about the cast, but it's best to say that the cast are superb. I don't think I could have stood the mood of the series this long unless the people doing the acting were something special, and they are. Even Jamie Bamber, sometimes critiqued for being a bit wooden and for Apollo being a bit...bothersome...is interesting to watch.

The revelations are dealt with simply. We sort of find out what happened to Earth. We definitely see who the Final Cylon is. We deal with the mystery of Starbuck's Shiny Viper. Are you watching, LOST? Look! This lot answer questions! It even tells us what's going to happen now that they've been to Earth, giving the writers plenty of time to sort out some other loose ends. Of course, a couple more questions are asked and there is still a big mystery or two to unravel but this is very much the opening to the last run that I had hoped it would be.

Although, it's only fair to say that having watched this episode and been rivetted by it, I then had to watch some Doctor Who to remind myself that life is, in fact, worth living.

The Stock Market! It's happening again!

2009-01-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

People who cannot understand the relationship between cause and effect should not be allowed out.

The latest reason to sell all your shares and move your money into 1980s era survivalist bunkers and dried food is...retail sales were down in Quarter 4 of 2008!

Of course no one could have seen that coming. There were no indicators in 2008 that it might be a bit of a lean christmas or anything, so the news that in the face of potential job losses, the struggle of the auto industry to do anything resembling sensible, general panic and mayhem leading to tumbling share prices which crash the value of a company and force it to look really hard at it's bottom line...none of these things might contribute to nervous Christmas punters believing that a sock, or a mattress, might be safer to put money in than a bank, and certainly important to save.

So, in the face of expectations that sales would be down, because we've all seen that happen in uncertain times before, and it was predicted by any amount of financial pundits, what we're looking at is the shocked response of a market to news that it has been expecting for at least a month.

Oh no! It's exactly as we believed it would be! Run to the hiiiiiiiiiillllssss!!!

Does that strike anyone else as illogical? Even...skittish? Stupidly so?

The return of insomnia

2009-01-06T19:20:00.000-08:00

I can't sleep.

I'm getting by on a couple of hours a night, which isn't enough, and everything has started to get difficult, and emotionally dark, and unhappy.

I need to sleep.

Instead, I'm hanging on to being awake as if I had my fingers at the very edge of a precipice and was dangling over great depth. Not that I want to. I just can't slow my head down. And the worst of it is, athough I can get it together to write a blog post or a mail, I can't string words together to write a story because I can't settle on anything other than first person present tense.

This is the third time in as many months. What's going on in my head that won't let me sleep?

The Brightonomicon

2009-01-05T20:25:00.000-08:00

Robert Rankin is the man who has taken the telling of the tall tale and turned it into novels. BBC Radio 7 turned his novel into a thirteen part radio series, in which the man himself cameos, and it is wonderfully funny.

The story centers on Hugo Rune, the Guru's Guru, played by David Warner. Warner is well cast, oscillating between grandiose arrogance, mysterious pronouncements and sleaze with effortless charisma and charm. As a bit of a Rankin fanboy, I have to say that he sounds much as I had imagined Rune would. Rune himself is based on the likes of Aleister Crowley, so if you know Big Al's reputation, you know what to expect from Rune.

In this instance, Rune has set himself twelve tasks based on the Brighton street zodiac which forms the Brightonomicon itself. Further than that, explanations of the plot are pointless since Rankin's works often seem to meander from bizarre situation to surreal circumstance until the author sees fit to bring everything together in one mystifying finale. All of this, all of the running jokes, the asides, the digressions into so-odd-it-could-only-be-real forteana, the sometimes chilling conspiracies, all of these things are present in the radio series. Including the continuing gag about the General Electrics minigun, which is a personal favourite.

In the Brightonomicon you will find weeping statues of Queen Victoria, Morris Minors forever cursed to wander a one way system, the terrible truth about the National Health System, the multifold dangers of Spaniels and many more things besides.

You will also find Andy Serkis as Count Otto Black, the most evil man in the world and the nemesis of Hugo Rune, and Mark Wing Davey (better known to fandom as the original (and best) Zaphod Beeblebrox) as the literally ubiquitous barman Fangio.

Characters from other Rankin books pop up - Danbury Collins (psychic youth and world pocket billiards champion) and Lazlo Woodbine both show their faces.

It's worth finding, if you can, and listening to. Also, it speaks rather highly of BBC 7 that they would include this as part of their science fiction and fantasy hour. 13 thirty minute installments allow you to gasp with awe and shock at the powers of the legendary Rune and his apprentice Rizla, and gasp you will as the Guru's Guru, the Lad Himself, the Hocus Bloke does his stuff.

Highly recommended, as are Robert Rankin's books.

The Obligatory Matt Smith Post

2009-01-03T21:25:00.001-08:00

Matt Smith is going to be, short of there being a terrible accident between now and when the 2010 season airs, the next Doctor Who.

And what I think about that is...it's a bloody long time to wait in order to find out what the new chap is like.

I know nothing about Smith, so today I watched The Ruby In The Smoke - which he is in, and in which he's pretty good. He's got a very distinctive look - he looks like a man who is very much older, who was a prizefighter, and had his face reassembled by aliens who were told "leave everything just as it is, but make him look 18".

This is what Moffat et al will have noticed about him. Despite his youth - he's 26 - he looks as if he's been around a lot longer and seen a few things but mysteriously none of it has touched him. Is this what we want in a Doctor?

It doesn't matter. This is one of those times when fandom is going to have to reserve judgement - not that it will, because I haven't - and be quiet. I'm asking a lot of fandom, which generally behaves like an entire mental facility of turbulent six year olds with ADHD who have had their meds switched for raw sugar and amphetamines, and I don't think I'm going to get it to cooperate unless I wade in with a big stick. Since that's not my job, I won't.

Lawrence Miles has his usual incisive things to say, and he gets a link because even when I disagree with absolutely everything he has to say, I still like to read him. But my main critique of what Lawrence has to say is the same thing I would say to each and every person who is wailing and moaning at the moment: give the production team their due. They are supposed to understand how to cast a show, we are meant to watch the results and if they have screwed up we will find out very quickly.

For the record, Matt Smith was interesting enough in The Ruby in the Smoke that I went and found The Shadow in the North, which I believe he is also in, and will watch that over the coming week. I liked his performance. So I see this casting as a positive thing and will await developments.

Something to keep in mind, though, is that Fandom has been collectively wrong about every single new Doctor since Hartnell's departure. They have all brought something new and interesting to the show and the part. Yes, even Sylvester McCoy! Anyone wants to disagree with me on that score, feel free. You'll lose, but feel free. It is a testament to the level of investment that the viewers and fans have that we all have "our" Doctor. (I've got two - Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy; the first got me into the show, the second got me back into it and then kept me there). Matt Smith is going to generate his own collection of fans who will, in the space of eighteen months, be squeeing their way across the internet and glorying in everything he does, much to the disdain of older and unhappier fans.

So it goes. I wish Matt Smith well.

A Slight Case of Block

2009-01-01T23:35:00.000-08:00

One of this year's resolutions is to write more. That's all very well, but the issue with writing is that you sometimes write yourself into a corner and then can't work out what to do next.

Late last year I rather foolishly set myself the task of creating a fanfic that describes the Time War from the viewpoint of people who aren't involved in it. So far, I have a couple of ideas bubbling away and I've even done some work on them.

The first is done, and describes the Dalek raid on Goth. It introduces us to the Torchwood Array and to three characters who will be important in later episodes. It's due for revision, because it's two stories in one and they don't mesh very well.

Part two is called something like Shrapnel and is at least planned if not actually written.

Part three is called Distant Guns, and it's this one I'm currently stuck on. It deals with Dhiren Koduri, the archivist from the first story, and the direct effect of having a Time War go on around you without your being aware of it. The issue stems from a conversation or two that fandom has had over on the DWF about how you would show the effects of the war. My problem is that those conversations have been limited to talking abou the battles and the ways in which you would depicted them without a squillion dollar budget and the good offices of Industrial Light and Magic.

My first thoughts were that a writer could mess with the narrative structure. You could repeat paragraphs, you could make sudden jumps or alternations in what was happening, swap major characters around as the Time War changes the past and present at the same time. I tried it and the result is an ugly mess with no real sense of a story being told.

Then I thought that perhaps I could play games with tense and perspective; I could shift from past tense third person to present tense, and then to future tenses. Again, all this really achieves is garbling the story.

I thought about format. I could split part of the narrative into columns and tell the same story three different ways. Once more, while this might be an interesting idea it just makes for confusion and mild annoyance on my part.

I think in the end it's going to come down to a major re-write and the thing I am least good at: attention to detail. I've already decided to take a relaxed stroll to the Edge of the Idea and see what the view is like out there; my suspicion is that you can create the awareness of a major event - like the destruction of a planet - by altering a minor detail or two. Here's an example: let's say the action takes place on a colony world, somewhere you have to ship specific items to. You could have a character comment that a foodstuff is fresh from Doomed Star IV, and then later on that foostuff can be gone and the character can explain that there simply aren't any worlds close enough to grow it and ship it before said foodstuff spoils.
All this attention to detail means I need to go back and set the scene properly, and try to break my habit of staring things in media res - which I assume has become a habit because I'm too impatient to start the story with the beginning and prefer to walk in after all the introductions have been made and everyone's sorted out where to sit. Mind you, that goes back to my general belief that you never start at the beginning of anything, that everything happens in the middle of something else, and while I'm sure that's true it doesn't necessarily comprise the best way to tell a tale.

Either way, I think it's time I did some reading and got some sleep, and I absolutely refuse to spend any time playing with the bizzare vingette that I spontaneously started on which goes some way to explaining how the grey Daleks you see attacking Goth become the Bling Daleks of the TV series, and for some reason it wants to be written without the main character ever speaking a single word. I need to finish Distant Guns first, and then do Shrapnel, and then revise Goth, and then find something for Tom the Posthuman to do (which is going to involve me reading about what Larry Miles thinks posthumans are, and what today's Posthuman movement thinks it is).

And so to bed. Night all.

2008..in review

2008-12-31T23:20:00.000-08:00

So how was your year?

Mine was the usual mixed bag. As I accelerate away from 2008 and into 2009, I thought it was worth looking back and toting up the high and lowlights.

On the Upside:

New Music. The likes of British Sea Power have made this year more entertaining than it would have been. When I was a teenager (some time back in the early 1700s, according to my personnel file at work, which I discovered today has my year of birth as 1699) music was the most important thing in the world. Less so these days. However, there are some excellent bands out there and if anyone feels like recommending some, please feel free.

Good TV. I've watched less of it and spent more time catching up on shows via services like Hulu and Joost. Nevertheless, a cracking season of Doctor Who and the revival of Survivors, accompanied by Fringe and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the ongoing presence of Top Gear and an assortment of decent documentaries from the dear old BBC have meant I still have a use for a TV set.

The Wrinklies. Denizens of an internet forum, or two, and decent thinking people who occasionally read and comment here. Marvellous chaps, all of them.

Facebook. I despise MySpace, but have apparently fallen into the trap of having a Facebook account and posting stuff there. As a social networking site it has been remarkably inefficient for the most part, but it has allowed me to kind of sort of reconnect with a few old friends.

Published! I finally got off my arse and wrote some stuff for a variety of outlets. I got paid - not very much, I admit, but it counts - and I also got to write some Doctor Who stuff for The Celestial Toybox, which is probably what I'm most proud of (unless you count an ongoing fanfic idea that I don't seem to be able to stop tinkering with and probably deserves a blog of it's own). Let's be honest, it's a small start, but after years of doubt and buggering about I achieved that small start, and I'm delighted. The new year's resolution for 2009 is to write more, and better.

Work. I recently came to the conclusion that the company I work for has no clue what I do or why it's important. Last year, I came to the same conclusion but from the opposite end and it left me feeling awful. It's hard to have a lot of responsibility and be under pressure with no way to pass any of the burden off; it's harder still to never be recognised for it. This year, this week in fact, I realised how much freedom I have. If they don't know what I'm doing or how I'm doing it that gives me vast leeway to do it my way. So while the focus of my team is on client and customer, I'm burrowing off into the infrastructure and learning how and why it all works.

Plus, the Band. The Relo Rockers, for whom I write the odd lyric here and there, has got me praise for the thing I love. And what praise! "Why is he here? He's brilliant" said one, while another told me "What's someone as creative as you doing working in that department?"

So, at this point, they can say what they want to me. I have a plan.

On the Downside:

If you've read the blog you know. If you don't know, read the blog.

There are more ups than downs.

And I wanted a pithy comment to put here, something to round it all out, say something simple and clear, but it hasn't been that sort of year. I've got a difficult and painful time ahead of me, nothing that 2009 holds is going to be easy. In fact, I think most of it is going to be quite unpleasant. I can be cowed by this and hide under the covers, or I can admit my faults and failings, patch them as best I can and get on with it.

The only way to meet the year is head on.

Come on, then, 2009. If you think you're hard enough.

The Next Doctor

2008-12-26T12:01:00.001-08:00

I can encapsulate this Christmas special thusly:

It was Doctor Who - wonderful nonsense.

There. Done. Assorted fellow fans have griped about the ending, and I don't disagree with them entirely. Here's why:

The Cyber-King is pointless. It is just a huge stompy steampunk robot. The Doctor's babbled explanation that it's a dreadnought class ship with a conversion factory inside is mystifying because it comes out of nowhere - (however, see later for Amusing Fan Theory #23811) - these are Cybusmen, after all, and he doesn't know that much about them (however, see later for Amusing Fan Theory #431), and also the monster with the conversion factory is only useful if it stops to capture people to convert them. There are really two reasons to have the vast stompy robot.

1: It's impressive as all hell. Cyberzilla. This is pure spectacle, a triumph for The Mill, all very Iron Gianty.

2: It pulls the bad guys away from the humans and isolates them. The Doctor is forced to ascend to face Ms. Hartigan and is therefore also isolated. The human drama goes on at street level, while the gods duke it out up above.

The interesting stuff, for me, is that the clash of elements and concepts. The ending is very Heaven vs Hell. We have seen how the cybermen have been lurking in the sewers (again! is it a tradition with them? "We're in London, lads, let's hide in the sewers!"), which they have transformed into their base of steampunk operations, but this isn't the forge of Vulcan...it's closer to the scenes we saw in Isengard, or in some of Bosch's paintings. It's an underworld, it's Hell. Filling it with terrified innocents is rather a blunt metaphor for what happens when people seek revenge. Then the cybermen rise, with a scarlet woman riding the head of the Beast, and we're ini Revelations territory. Everything about the cybes at this point is about the Underworld - even the fact that they are steel, and riding a giant made of iron, Ms. Hartigan is wearing red (a ferrous colour, as well as the colour of flame and passion)... it's all biblical.

And it goes on!

Having risen, the CyberKing is confronted by the Doctor in a balloon. Here we have the element of air vs the element of Earth, or Heaven facing down Hell. Hell is legion, Heaven is just the one bloke. But we also know that the Doctor is more than a flesh and blood individual; more and more we've had it demonstrated that the Doctor is a set of ideas and principles; when Lake has his brain rewired by the infostamp, he absorbs the qualities of The Doctor and then becomes him. So the Doctor isn't necessarily a person, he can be a concept, an ethereal notion.

Then we get the Doctor's offer: come with me if you want to live.

He's got to make that offer. It's the Good Guy Rule. Only a villain or an anti-hero can kill without first offering the chance for redepmtion or peace. Even if the Doctor knows the answer before he makes the offer, he has to make it otherwise he's "just another alien threat". That we all know, as he does, what the answer will be is neither here nor there. Everyone believes he's the hero, he has to act like the hero. He also, as he points out, gets forced into being the executioner.

That's the price that the 10th Doctor has paid for his freedom. If the monsters have nightmares about the Doctor, it's because they force him to become the thing they fear the most. As fans, we know what the Doctor really wants. He wants to go and have fun, preferably with people he loves, and that is constantly denied him. He says that his companions leave because they find someone else, or because they have to, and he knows that his life - and the presence of the monsters, and what they make him into - is why his companions leave. The anger he shows in the moment before he zaps the CyberKing, is because yet again he's being forced to take responsibility for the actions of monsters; while the Doctor wouldn't ever turn his back on someone in need, he's becoming tired of the price he has to pay.

Which is why he accepts dinner. And why he hangs around for the applause.

The Amusing Fan Ideas.

How Does The Doctor Know So Bloody Much?
- like, how did he know about the CyberKing?

The answer is that he doesn't. The Doctor stumbles into a situation and stares at it for a few seconds, then starts talking. There are two possibilities here:

1: He's making it up. Who'd know the difference?

2: The TARDIS has all the answers, and is feeding them to him. After all, the TARDIS is alive and a vastly powerful time machine with telepathic circuits that can get into the heads of humans and aliens alike. There's no reason it couldn't have had a wander around in the Cyberleader's head, or the heads of the Cybermen when the Doctor met and spoke with them.

Let's not forget, the Doctor may not actually speak English. He might be speaking Gallifreyan and we're just hearing English because of the Tardis. This has to hold true for all of the monsters he meets too - the TARDIS has access to their brains because it's translating for him. If it can read the language centers, it can probably read everything else too - including memories.

Thus, when the TARDIS has information that it knows the Doctor wants, it supplies that information. However, the TARDIS has a sense of the dramatic; it never tells the Doctor the entire story and it never gives him all the answers he needs. Thus, it occurs to me that the Doctor is, in fact, being strung along by the TARDIS for the ship's own amusement.

Why Did The Cybusmen Build a CyberKing?

Mostly for all of the reasons in the main post above, I think, but here's another theory.

Since the events of Silver Nemesis the universe has technically been without Cybermen. These alternate versions, on entering the Doctor Who universe, have encountered a phenomena unique to that reality: the morphogenic field.

The Morphogenic Field is one of the things that binds the universe together and ensures that most aliens are humanoid and most of them speak to communicate instead of using lights, hand gestures, complex dances, smells etc. It also ensures that certain things keep happening; it's the source of Narrative Causality. In this case, for example, the reason that the Cybermen build a giant to go stomping over London is because of the following threads of Narrative Causality:

1: Godzilla. Giant monsters flatten cities after rising from improbably shallow bodies of water.

2: Gog and Magog, the giants and protectors of London.

3: The Cybermen of our universe might have created a Cyberking, and the Cybusmen are slowly being changed by exposure to the Morphogenic Field.

4: You've got to have giant robots. Where the technology exists to have a giant robot, a giant robot is the outcome. Humans of a certain type seem irresistably drawn to giant robots.

anyway, that's that.

'Twas Christmas Day in the Workhouse

2008-12-25T21:07:00.001-08:00

I thought today might be a bit rough.

You know, what with one thing and another. It turned out not to be.

Various denizens of the apartment complex were merry, one guy dancing in his doorway having attacked the Christmas spirit with a couple of straws. The Soon To Be Ex Wife came over with the kids. They bought me a kettle, a posh one with a base unit that turns itself off. I like those.

In terms of loot, I also scored some rather fine tea (and have drunk a pot of Chai by myself, me really knowing how to push the boat out in no uncertain terms). I also have a Starbucks and Barnes and Noble Giftcard. Barnes and Noble will shortly be in receipt of their card in exchange for a couple of books; they don't have the range that Amazon has but since any books I buy in the next year are either going on ebay or being shipped home, I will wait for making landfall in the UK before attacking the books on the Amazon wishlist.

Anyway, I ate a non-christmas dinner and I have watched a bit of TV - on Joost, as it happens - and have done a bit of reading.

I'm tired now. The last couple of weeks have been exhausting, but today I'm really feeling it. I shall sleep shortly; assuming I don't pick up The Alienist by Caleb Carr, because it's a psychological profiling hunting serial killers book set in the late part of the 19th century, and because it's a foodie book. The author constructs some truely astounding meals, and reading them is actually nicer than eating them would be.

This is my third christmas on my own, which isn't bad considering my age, and I find that just for once the hoopla and the fuss isn't being missed at all. I'll take the peace and quiet, thanks, and hope that if you're reading this your coming year is also peaceful and quiet.

Merry Christmas.

Domestic bliss?

2008-12-22T15:59:00.000-08:00

I haven't decided what to call the new place yet.

For those interested, I'm living in a single bedroom apartment in a small complex in Phoenix. I have four rooms: the kitchen is tiny and I have a walk in closet that is nearly as big, so I count them as half a room each.

It looks a bit like the picture above. In fact, that's my sofa.

I have, of course already altered it. That arm chair? Right to the table where the PC is currently located. The complex has wifi, so that's what's connecting me to this. The kitchen is to the left, and the bed (which offers superior corrective massage when I'm out) you can just see to the right.

In a fit of domestic pride, I cleaned the oven when I got home from work today. This is partly me being house proud and partly me not wanting a colossal cleaning bill when I move out.

In the meantime, between worrying vaguely about laundry and sorting out all the tedious ephemera of changing addresses, I am attempting to write. It's not easy. The laundry, while not pressing, weighs on my mind. And to be perfectly honest, the bed is like sleeping on sticks wrapped around granite, so I could do with a kip. Perhaps the couch?

Mutating Language

2008-12-19T17:42:00.001-08:00

It sort of bothers me when people take a phrase and get it wrong, and then defend their wrongness. It bothers me even more when they claim that the language is changing and that I should "get with it" or somesuch nonsense.

Recently encountered howlers:

"that would be a bit of a damp squid."
- the word is "squib". Saying a squid is damp is...silly. Of course it's damp. It lives under water.

"Lip-singing"
- have you tried singing without lips? It's "Lip-synch", because you synchronise the movement of your lips to the playback.

"to be pacific"
- because you are not an ocean, and because you mean "specific".

"irregardless"
- double negative hell-word.

I think particular ire should be reserved for those who insist on propagating their ignorance and defying correction. I don't think we need go as far as pillorying, or burning at the stake, but I do think a rolled-up newspaper to the forehead might be instructive.

Of course, anyone using the word "irregardless" probably also uses the phrase "pro-active" and that's a shooting offence.

Heroes: Fugitives

2008-12-17T16:41:00.001-08:00

And it looks like they've hired a writer for the next season. OK, I will be watching.

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

More Sarah Connor

2008-12-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

"Earthlings Welcome Here" is the finale of the current run; Sarah believes she has a lead to a company that is developing Skynet type technology, via blogger, and Riley strays from her mission somewhat.

The long and the short is: good ep. Through Riley, we get to see the effect of the transition between Skynet future and our present. Out of her environment, Riley behaves very much like someone who has been institutionalised. Her responses to the various stimuli of her life are not always appropriate and she has great difficulty fitting in. Even her interaction with John is becoming more strained and tense, which Cameron has noted. Riley, friendless and disconnected, locks herself in a bathroom and slashes her wrists. We are not reassured as to her fate.

Sarah's fate also remains unresolved, and as the widget over there --> tells us, it's 60 days until the next episode.

Crap.

It's a very low key cliffhanger. In both cases, there's genuinely something to be worried about because for both characters the future is uncertain. They have threatened two people we have grown to care for.

Riley, though a secondary character and not one I have really paid much attention to before, is really pretty good. For a while I hoped that she was representative of the normal life that John Connor wasn't going to get. As it turns out, she's a honeytrap and just there to distract him from his relationship with Cameron. Nevertheless, Riley has more to her than this simple mission and our current revelation - that she was never a soldier - is nicely portrayed by a flash-forward to her marginal life in the corners of John Connor's campaign and then a flash back to her arriving in present day California and exploring the simple pleasures of a not so upscale motel room.

Sarah, meanwhile, is chasing UFOs and UFO believers because of some drone type technology. The interesting thing here is that Sarah once more lingers over the people she was; we have images of Sarah Connor in a waitress's uniform (which is what she did for a living way back in Terminator) and a much harder version in the scrubs she wore in the mental institution, complete with spinning knife and "No Fate" carved into a tabletop.

So who is Sarah Connor? Like Riley, she's essentially alone. John is exhibiting greater and greater independance, Cameron can protect him far more efficiently than she can...is her usefulness as a parent at an end?

And are they really doing this? Come on! Surely this "children grow up and leave home and stop needing you" stuff is more suited to Gilmore Girls. Surely this is the dreaded Sope! much reviled by Doctor Who fandom?

Yeah. It really is. And it's really nicely done too. It sneaks in, it infiltrates.

There's also some stuff from Shirley Manson and teaching an AI about religion (which has got to be the worst thing to teach a computer! Do we really want a Fundamentalist AI?). It's going to be important later, you can hear this particular gun being loaded and set on the mantlepiece.

I've changed my mind since the last post about this show.
Watch this.

Heroes! Bit of an experiment.

2008-12-16T17:26:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to show how the cuts and switches affect the show, here's a recap, taken from notes that were taken as the show played on Hulu.

...perviously, on Heroes:

Hiro is stuck back in time sixteen years ago, hanging off a flagpole.
Arthur is not Sylar;s daddy, and Peter is not a killer.
And we get a homily not from Mohinder but from...Sylar. Who says
"what we choose is never what we truly need, for that is the ultimate cosmic joke, That is the real gift god has left behind".

And now Peter wants to destroy the formula and Nathan wants to inject another dozen marines with the formula.

Nathan has officially adopted his dad's scheme. And he tells Peter "either you're with me..."
Meanwhile Noah grabs a couple of shotguns and prepares to go hunting while Sylar takes over the Company facility, having murdered all the guards, and taunts everyone. Claire and Sylar have a little heart to heart. Having locked everyone in the level 5 facilitym he tells them he's going to show them they're all monsters exactly like him....wait. Who does that remind you of? Is he replaying The Killing Joke?

Meanwhile, back at Hiro...
Well, not with Hiro, Parkman and Ando and the speedster girl are at Mohinder's place, but he's not there and they realise that they need Mohinder. Who is dying in a scaley and messy manner. He's going to try the new formula, but here comes Petey the Punisher with a gun. There's a discussion which goes nowhere useful other than getting all the formula trashed. There is a blur of wind, the formula vanishes, and it is delivered to Ando, who injects himself. We have a bit of a theoretical discussion about abilities: people seem to get the things they believe they need most - Matt used to worry about what people thought of him and he learned to read minds. Of course, we don't see the transformation right away...we cut to -

Sylar's mindgame: he offers Claire the option of getting out alive, with Noah and Biomom, in return for shooting Angela. Claire refuses, and shoots a telephone instead.

And we cut to Noah. He's released all the maniacs in Level 5 and promised them freedome if they kill Sylar. He mentions that he's really released them as bait.

Back to Ando and company, who are testing Ando's new ability...which he doesn't appear to have, until he punches something.

Back to Sylar. Creepy puppeteer guy attempts to mind control Sylar and fails. Sylar injects biomom with adrenalin, at which point she loses control of her powers.

And then cut to Noah, who finds Meredith (biomom) in a Level 5 Cell. Sylar locks him in, with a gun and a single bullet, and gives Noah a choice - burn to death or kill Meredith and have to explain himself to Claire.

Back to Nathan, who is pontificating. He starts a fight with a guy who becomes stronger as people become more fearful. Nathan is saved from an asskicking by his blonde icemaiden, who kills the strongman.

Back to Ando, who has discovered that he can amplify the powers of others. Matt can suddenly hear the minds of everyone, and it seems his girlfriend , once touched, moves so fast she goes back in time.

Meanwhile, we're with Sylar and Claire as Claire attempts to save her parents. Which she does. There is an odd moment as Claire asks her thermobaric mother to come with her, but mommy, who is unable to stop generating flames, won't. Claire looks all fierce and says "I''m coming back for you". Which is good because the adrenalin will wear off eventually.

Nathan and Ice maiden are talking spin control. Nathan fires her.

Back at Ando, a plan to rescue Hiro is hatched.

Hiro, and his younger self, go after the formula. And get it, only to be confronted by Hiro;s dad. George Takei goes all Samuri, wielding a big sword. The formula is ripped in half.

Icemaiden steals the formula and is about to walk off with it when Hiro and the Speedster turn up. Icemaiden calls Hiro "Pikachu".

Meanwhile, back with Peter, the lab trashing is over. Mohinder is swamped with formula and is cured, then Peter and Nathan beat each other up.

The lan burns, and Peter jabs himself with formula, getting his powers back and saving Nathan and flying out of the inferno.

Back to Sylar and Angela. Angela attempts to convince Sylar that she's been in his corner all along. It backfires. Angela admits that the Sylar is not her son, and then she lies about her motives. And then she admits everything, and offers Sylar the truth about his parents. He's about to get it when Claire stabs him in the neck - her one weak spot and therefore his too.

Meredith is about to go Supernova and there is a tearful goodbye.

And back to Peter and Nathan. Peter saved Nathan because they are brothers.

And the end monologue is Mohinder, but things appear to be reset. The formula is gone, everyone but Hiro has their powers back. Then we go to...

Three weeks later, where Nathan has sold everyone out to the US Government. Nathan wants to round everyone up and put them in prison.

Oh, and the president is a youngish black guy.

So we've had "Arkham Asylum" and now shades of the X-Men too. Ah, onward.

So, Frank Said...

2008-12-15T17:13:00.000-08:00

...would I recommend The Sarah Connor Chronicles?

And I wouldn't want to set Frank up with anything less than something good.

The premise of the show is solid. It takes place after Terminator 2; the future is still there to fight for, Sarah Connor is alive, John is a teenager and another Terminator has been sent back to protect John from Skynet.

Good Things:

Lena Heady. She plays Sarah Connor and picks up the character notes from T2; Sarah is well on her way to becoming a machine, at least emotionally, in order to protect John. Lena does this very effectively, she's chilling and precise and ruthless. The character gets plenty of time to crack, too, and show the very human interior which is basically a mother doing anything and everything for her child.

Shirley Manson. She plays Catherine Weaver, head of a really advanced research company with an interest in AI. She's chilly, remote, she even looks forbidding and a bit sterile. Catherine Weaver has a daughter that is scared of her, and apparently very few social skills. Shirely Manson does much the same thing as Lena Heady, but is a mirror to her because Catherine Weaver is an advanced T-1001 and is learning a lot about being human, including how to parent.

Not, you understand, in a Star Trek "grasp the human factor" way. In calculating, let's be a perfectly disguised terminator way.

Summer Glau. She plays Cameron, a Terminator reprogrammed to protect John Connor. Summer Glau is a very physical actor; a lot of her performance is in body position and movement. In this case, she has "machine" down to something graceful and not quite beautiful. She also gets to emote from time to time, which is amusing to see in some respects and worrying in others.

Time Travel. Like I said in a recent post, this show could possibly be exploring paradox and free will, and doing so in quite a sly and clever way.

Bad Things

Time Travel. The biggest issue I have with the show is that it treats time travel like Star Trek treats the Transporter - as a way of introducing new characters or situations. No bad thing, but there are a number of plot problems here.

First - how does Skynet know when a plan has failed?
Typically, a circumstances arises and Skynet responds to this by sending a Terminator into the past in order to undo or prevent it. This immediately creates a paradox, right? And the only way to resolve the paradox is for everything to stay just as it was. No matter what happens, Skynet will be born, Judgement Day will happen, John Connor will unite humanity - what's left of it - against the machines and the events of Terminator and T2 will happen. Sarah Connor's mantra "No fate but what we make" is just a lie she tells herself to stop feeling out of control.

The other issue is how fractious and divided and annoying some of the humans are. You'd think that facing extinction would be the one thing that stops humans being bitchy and political, but apparently not. Granted, having the humans be less than the full on shaved ape would be making the whole thing too black and white, too easy to understand: meat good, machine bad. Even so, does everyone from the future need to have an agenda? A good example is a character who presents herself as essentially being a refugee from the war, a soldier who ran away to the years before Judgement Day, and who seems intent on enjoying some actual life. While this is an engaging character point, and while stories can certainly be woven around this, the writers instead opted to tell us that really there is a plot by the humans to manipulate John Connor so he doesn't have such warm fuzzy feelings towards certain types of terminator. It's all a bit Machiavellian; perhaps it doesn't need to be, perhaps there's plenty going on?

Or perhaps this is just the writers attempting to steer the show away from the "terminator of the week" syndrome that looms, or allows them to give Sarah Connor a home to defend and a single location for us to get used to?

Do I recommend it? Not sure.

It's not the most innovative or deep show on TV at the moment, but it's worth watching on something like Hulu. It's taken a couple of pages out of BSG's book, it works and it has some engaging performances and interesting stories. I make room for it on a weekly basis, because it does do things that BSG doesn't do. It has a sense of humour. It answers questions. It gives the villains a human face without making them human or wannabe human.

Yeah. I like it. Are there better things a person with a packed schedule could be watching?

Almost certainly. But it's sufficiently different to other prime time shows for me to say "Check out a couple of episodes, and see whether it makes you want to watch more". I have the strong feeling this is a marmite show.

What was it I did for a living, again?

2008-12-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

I work in Relocation. International relocation specifically, although there's not that much of it around at the moment. The company I work for, and I shall mention no names because you know how these blog get around, is a company that also does relocation within the USA and separates the two groups of business into Domestic and International.

International is really about Assignment Management. People are shipped off around the world for periods lasting between a couple weeks and many years. In the meantime, some unbelievably complex things happen to their financial status and their tax burden, and we also have to arrange shipment of things like household goods and schooling for kids...all manner of malarky.

The people I work with are unbelievably diverse. Between us we represent 22 nationalities and speak 29 languages; we have six major faiths (three of which are Christian offshoots, but they count) and a panoply of accents.

Everyone who works on that team, with the exception of my wife, has lived or worked abroad and has an understanding of what it is to be a stranger in a strange land.

They are an incredibly interesting bunch of people.

The work itself is beyond complicated and very people intensive. Part of our accounting function is based in India, because processing expenses and suchlike is a huge drain on resources, and a large part of our jobs ends up being jousting with the Outsourced beancounters about what they should or should not allow. One of the ironic things is that they regularly deny expenses that are accompanied by receipts that are not in English.

First, if you have ever been to Korea, or China, have you tried getting a receipt in English? This works the same for Iceland too.

Second, do you see the irony of a company in India, where there are about eleventy major languages, complaining about documents not being in English?

Other interesting things are afoot too. One of the things you can do in my job is watch trends. For example - if you want to know where the best place in the world to hire cheap workers is, watch the relocation and assignment patterns of some of the major companies. For the last couple of years, I have been looking at Africa and I've decided that if it could sort itself out there are parts of Africa that would be ideal for the kind of thing that India currently does. Capitalism is driving upgrades in the standard of living westwards, away from China and back towards Europe. In a couple of centuries, the Low Countries and France will be where it's all happening. History is cyclical in so many respects.

A Rather Cluttered Day

2008-12-13T17:12:00.000-08:00

I still don't talk about me, much, but...

I have found somewhere else to live, I think, subject to me proving that I can pay rent and am not a serial killer. I might post a link to it at some point.

I have made plans to return to the UK via Aer Lingus, always supposing that they will take me.

I have sorted out how much it costs to outfit a little place of my own. The answer is "a lot", but it's all doable.

And now, some Other Stuff.

Insomnia TV, Again.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

For the first time since I started following this show, it bored me.
I don't think it was the show's fault, necessarily, because I have a really short attention span just now.
However; the plot is that Skynet has used a bio weapon and it turns out that one person is immune. That person produces antibodies which give John Connor's mob a cure. So Skynet sends a Terminator back to kill the person in the past. Sarah Connor and chums arrive on the scene to prevent this.
It turns out that the person with the immunity hasn't been born yet, and has only recently been conceived, so all heck breaks loose and many people run around being chased by a terminator. The clueless family - those crazy n00bs - get in the way, but eventually sort themselves out and the cure is safeguarded.

The Time Travel aspect of the show is interesting, as ever, as is the idea that the two realities seem to be contiguous. On the one hand, Skynet is fighting to change the past so that it wins. Given that the world is chaotic and that sending a Terminator back to kill things with explosions and big guns is effectively using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, it seems overly simple. If this was up to the 7th Doctor, for example, he would simply arrange for the family to be left alone and then quietly relocate them to ground zero of one of the Judgement Day bombs, thus ensuring that they are all vaporised. By sending the Terminator back, Skynet ensures that the targets know all about Skynet and the future, so they are in the right places at the right times. Is this evil sewing the seeds of it's own destruction or a hint that machines cannot have free will? Or what?

Heroes

Have I mentioned that this show is going off the rails on a crazy train?
No?
This show is going off the rails on a crazy train.

In this week's exciting episode:

Matt, Ando and Speedy Girl recover the missing edition of 9th Wonders, the prescient comic book.
Sylar kills Kirsten, and seems to once more be evil. He embarks on a killing spree, picking up powers the old fashioned way. He kills one poor office girl who is a human lie detector. It's also her birthday. Co-workers arrive with cake and balloons just as a Sylar, gory to the elbows, rises from the corpse. "Oooo" says Sylar "Cake!" and telekinetically slams the door behind them.
Peter and the Haitian go to kill Arthur Petrelli.
Hiro and Claire are sixteen years ago, because Hiro is ten and wants to show Claire that her dad loved her really. Then he sees his mummy and runs off to pretend to be a chef.
Claire messes with the past, preventing herself becoming the Catalyst.
Hiro instead becomes the catalyst, having had his mind restored by his mum, who is a healer. Handing over the catalyst kills his mum. Hiro and Claire meet, and bloody Arthur Petrelli shows up out of fucking nowhere to strip Hiro of his powers, and the Catalyst, and throw him off a roof.
Then, there is the big Scene of Doom as Nathan discovers a Super Soldier Project, using Arthur's catalysed blood to make the injection stable, and then goes along with it. A marine is injected and goes all superstrong. Meanwhile, upstairs the Haitian and Peter ambush Arthur. With his powers suppressed, Arthur looks constipated and Peter entirely fails to shoot him in the head until the very last moment, when Sylar appears out of fucking nowhere and telekineticaly stops the bullet in midair. He asks Arthur "Are you my father?" and Arthur says yes, and he's lying, so Sylar lets the bullet go. Arthur Petrelli is dead.

I bet he isn't. He's got all the powers under the sun at the moment so it's a matter of time before he sits up or steps out of fucking nowhere to do something arch and pointless or strip someone of their powers.

I'm prompted to swearing about this because it's just so annoying. I want someone to break the 4th wall, preferably someone who looks uncannily like Animal Man or Grant Morrison or someone, and just say
"Gosh, it's uncanny how you do that. It's like you were standing just off camera!"

I also want Arthur Petrelli dead for good. He's annoying me. Imagine if this happened in any other TV show. What if Horatio Caine was about to deploy the Justice Shades and Arthur Petrelli appeared out of fucking nowhere and stamped on them?

Or, if The Doctor was just about to charge down a corridor and burst into a room with a sudden inspiration only to have Arthur Petrelli appear out of fucking nowhere and slam a door in his face, causing a regeneration and subsequent post-regenerative amnesia in which the Doctor forgets everything (including his shoe size..."These shoes! I have no idea if they fit at all!")?

Next week, we learn whether Arthur Petrelli is dead and whether Sylar is going to turn good on the basis that gas prices are down and there's a T in the day.

Ten Things About Me.

2008-12-12T20:25:00.000-08:00

I am not used to this, so forgive me if it goes a little odd.

1: I hate talking about myself. You know this, but this is why: I would much prefer to talk about you, you are far more interesting and have lots more to teach me than I probably have to pass on to you. It's not like I've lead a dull life, but I find talking about myself almost unforgivably rude.

2: I can't not answer questions if I think I have the answer. Or even if I think I think I know the answer. It's a flaw, I know, but it's like a nervous tic.

3: Just at the moment, I'm not really me. I write like me and I can type like me but I don't feel like me. Yes, I'm currently going through some quite unpleasant things and I was expecting to be a bit out of sorts but today and most of this week it feels like I'm wearing me like a coat. And I hate it.

4: I am, I think, bipolar. And from what I understand I have an up and down cycle that is massively long. From experience, I have depressions and manic periods that last about three or four days each with a curve to both extremes that lasts weeks. Right now, I am manic. I have had insomnia for the past week, resulting in a sleepless night last night and a day of utter energy and scattered thinking today. I feel stretched, wound out, racked, and totally aware. My head is so clear and my ability to put things together - ideas, plans, concepts - is really sharp. The downside is that thinking about anything for more than a few minutes is like sandpaper.

I am not currently being treated. I ought to be. Right now, thanks to American medical care, I can't afford to get treated. In January, though, I am planning to see a doctor.

Edit: Since 5:30am yesterday I have had perhaps two hours sleep. It is 22:23, and I am still not able to relax my brain enough to sleep.

5: I love the art of the con. Perhaps more than any other aspect of human expression and endeavor, it reveals tons about who we are and what we want, and how we think we can get it. I particularly love the artistry involved in setting up and playing out the con. Unfortunately, the more I look for cons the more of them I see. So I try not to look. But when one comes up no matter how appalling the damage it's done, I can't help myself...I smile, and very occasionally I cheer just a little bit.

6: I tell fortunes. I can read Tarot cards, and I can cold read well enough to read palms. It's a con, I've no psychic talent at all - although sometimes people claim I've been accurate enough to surprise them. Of course, reading Tarot cards is technically not psychic, it's magic. Cartomancy. So maybe practicing that Art is what I'm doing and the person I'm conning is me. Or not. The point is, I don't trust "psychics", because I have found it ridiculously easy to pretend to be one.

7: I met my wife online, through a site that has since become defunct. We messaged, corresponded and spoke for nine months, met and married within three days, were separated for a further ten months and believed that having got through all of this we could meet practically any challenge. Of course, the things we weren't prepared for were the changes in ourselves. We're not the people who put themselves through two years of living at a distance; we changed because the tensions and stresses of being together, the peculiar stresses on me being a stranger in a strange land...an evolution took place in my wife and I did not evolve in the same way. I've been, in retrospect, badly depressed for two years and should have noticed something or done something much sooner. Instead, I withdrew as far as I could and tried to fix myself. I should have asked for help, demanded it. Be that as it may, I have some very happy memories and experiences, and I would not have chosen to do this differently. I have learned. The future will be better.

8: I write. Most of the time I write garbage. I love to write; I have written for H2G2, I have written for assorted sites and purposes, and I have written some fan fic. I have also written for CT, something that gives me a sense of pride that I have not felt in years. I used to write at school; kids do this - creating amusing fictions for groups of friends, portraying themselves as heroes. For me it was a way to express something that I wasn't being allowed to express by life. I am still very interested in writing, in the act and the technical details, in the how and the why. I wish I could create stories in as prolific a manner as some other writers because there is, honestly, no better feeling.

OK, there are one or two better feelings.

I write at work too. It's not strictly parody but I do re-write popular songs for the nefarious purposes of a singing group. They sing at company events, like major meetings. I am known as the lyricist and have been told I am brilliant. That's nice, of course, and I hope it's true. It would be nice to be noticed for doing something I enjoy. Adore. It's fun, and it seems like cheating to get applause for being happy.

9: The first book I remember reading was an Asterix book. When you're small, it seems unlikely that heroes would live in any other country but your own and the translations of those gorgeous books and stories were utterly engaging. I also read the James Blish novelisations of Star Trek, the Target novelisations of Doctor Who, and a bunch of science fiction novels. I remember something called Dragonfall Five, and a novel called Trillions, and a surprising amount of John Wyndham. I'd started with "Chocky" and graduated to "Day of the Triffids" before I'd found stuff like Tolkein or Douglas Adams. I'd also developed a lingering fondness for Ian Fleming. Not the Bond books - those came later - but for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which had a recipie for fudge in the last chapter. Whenever I took the book out of the library I would pester to be allowed to make the fudge; sometimes I was.

The end result is a love for escapist books. Science fiction more than fantasty, and it wasn't until much later that I realised how lucky Trekkies were to have James Blish and Joe Haldeman writing Trek stories or novelising the TV show.

I still love words and pictures. I admit a lingering fondness for the words, on paper, in a book with pages that slip and slide between fingers and slap shut, and flick. And I particularly adore second hand books that people have made notes in. It's like getting two books in one, and having a second hand book is like rescuing a puppy from the pound with the advantage that it won't eat your shoes and shit everywhere.

10: This was going to be sixteen things, but I am reaching the point where I can't concentrate on it any more. Sandpaper, and reticence.

Alert! Avian Flu - Poultry Outbreak - Hong Kong

2008-12-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

The title of this post was the subject line of an e-mail I got at work.

We get pandemic reports at work, simply because we have people traveling
all over the world and an outbreak of something nasty can cause travelers
all kinds of problems.

H5 hasn't crossed the species barrier yet, so it's not as big a deal as
everyone is thinking, and with luck it's just a matter of time before we
come up with an effective defense against it.  However, the headline itself
made me think of a Hong Kong terrorized by gangs of roaming chickens that spontaneously appear, thanks to a sort of viral interaction
with urban decay.  Sort of like "Night of the Living Dead", but with
chickens.

I even had this cinematic shot of a helicopter surveying the terror
stricken streets, high above HK, with a middle aged Charlton Heston sitting
in the door gunner position of a Huey - surely the archetypal helicopter
now - looking out over the streets and just saying "My Ghaaaaaaaaaad", in
that way that he did, to the faint background sound of a million chickens
going "Cluck?"

Transparency?

2008-12-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

It's an idea I've picked up from David Brin (his blog is over there, on the right) and it's one I have decided I rather like.

There are a host of reasons. The main one is: I love my privacy. I don't, in any sense, have any. I have no expectation of privacy at work, where my phone can be tapped and my computer keystrokes recorded and logged for later, and I have no expectation at home because I live with other humans. We all need space, but we can't all have it at the same time. Google stores my search habits, banks and stores store my buying habits. I'm tracked, data mined, coded and analysed every minute of every day.

Which is OK with me.

On the other hand, while I am perfectly happy to have all of this happen - it's apparently the consequence of a lifestyle that I rather like - I am not so happy that there are elements of the world which are not subject to the same rules.

It irks me that while I can hide nothing from the IRS, whole political parties obviously can. I am annoyed that if I question how a major company is spending money I am not allowed to find out the answers. I would quite like to have access to all of that information.

Would I use it?
Well, no, probably not. I think the ordinary schlub, like me, probably wouldn't. I believe, though, that there are a sufficient number of people who would in order to make the total societal transparency that David Brin espouses (and which is still a really good idea) very unlikely. I think a society grown so used to lying, and being lied to, is probably not going to handle truth very well.

Insomnia TV Too

2008-12-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, back at Hulu...

The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The story sort of continues. Riley, a rather nice young blond, is making further attempts to get into the teenage John Connor's underwear and keep him from spending time with Cameron. We now know that Riley has been sent back from the future to do exactly this, because the adult John Connor is far closer to terminators than he is people. This is a nice little development from the T2 film, in which we learn that John has formed an emotional attachment to the Arnie model. Meantime, Cameron has made friends with a night-shift librarian and is taking an abiding interest in local history.

As the episode progresses, John engages in a beat-down and finally snogs - and possibly sleeps with - Riley. Cameron discovers that a terminator (which are starting to suffer from Hero Gun complex) has been sent back too far and has decided to take the "long road" to the present day in order to carry out its mission.

Hero Gun complex: the heroes can hit things quite happily, but super-accurate terminators that can lay waste an FBI Hostage Rescue team can't take out a single one of them. It's annoying, because we know that the heroes are only going out in a season finale or a self sacrificing blaze of glory. In a show like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, this is probably necessary because the ensemle cast is small. It does take away from the tension, though, because a show that appears to be nihilistic in outlook (but isn't) has the capacity to be a lot more dangerous than this.

What's refreshing is that while Cameron has been made to appear sympathetic, she's not. She is still very much a machine, cares as much for one person as another, as we see when she treats the disappearance of her "friend" in the library with a moment's disconnection and then indifference. Summer Glau does an excellent job with this - she's hauntingly pretty and by the standards of American TV this must mean she's really good on the inside. Not so, as far as we can tell. She does a better job of this than Arnie.

Hereos

The Eclipse Part Two.

In which everyone gets their powers back.
This is predictable enough, I knew this was coming, and in the end it's just a reset switch of the worst kind.
For example - Noah slits Sylar's throat. And yet Sylar - who absorbed Claire's healing powers - returns at the end of the eclipse, covered in his own blood and angry.

This is still a very troubled show. The parts of the story with any satisfactory weight to them are the ones involving Hiro and Ando, the team for which the writers have very obvious affection, and Matt Parkman and his girlfriend. This is turning into a nice little redemption story.

Sylar, meanwhile, turns mean again. Look, guys, settle will you? Even Pro Wrestling maintains a face or heel turn longer and more consistently than this. Sylar is the human lightswitch of characters, from darkness to light a couple of times an episode. Now it's not about Sylar playing a complex game to outwit everyone and be his own person, it's a massively annoying inability of the writers to pick a trait and tell a story. Sylar as a badass villain works. Sylar struggling against his own power works. Sylar playing both halves of the Petrelli conspiracy against the middle works. But seeing him be all three in the same episode is just annoying.

I have actually now stopped caring about Nathan and Peter Petrelli. Nathan has suddenly and mysteriously, and with wonderful automagically applied illogic, decided to side with Dad because, as near as I can work out, making people superheroes would solve all world problems instead of creating hundreds of new ones. He rattles off a list of problem areas - Darfur being one of them - and seems to think that the presence of a person with abilities would make things better. It's clear that Senator Nathan Petrelli is a moron, driven by the plot's need to split the family down the middle he needs to stay one on a regular basis. I would say this is lazy writing, but I know better than that; it's not lazy, but it might be a sign of writers trying to arrange a situation that they can retcon later. That's something I don't like.

Fringe

The basic story, that there is a conspiracy afoot to do strange things with science, proceeds. This week's goodness includes:

Breaking into bank vaults by walking through walls.
Jailbreaks through time and space.
Cow grooming.
Walter makes inappropriate comments.
Shared memories.

We've also got an arc in progress, featuring a prisoner in Germany from a previous episode, but in order to explain it all, I would need to recap the story to date. Not gonna.

Fringe is worth watching, and then comparing to Torchwood, and then deliberately forgetting about Torchwood. It's turning up on British TV soon and I advise it be watched.

Insomnia TV

2008-11-29T09:34:00.000-08:00

In the last week or so, I haven't been sleeping much and while not sleeping I have been watching TV and catching up on shows I have missed on Hulu.

So. Some reviews.

Heroes is all a bit complicated.

So...the Petrelli family continues with it's twisty ways, totally unable to be in the same place without hating one another. Angela's paralysis is cured in a dreamscape sequence engineered by Matt Parkman; we get the usual stuff about psychosomatic injuries becoming real, and Matt's new girl attempts to save him, and then Arthur "Call me Q" Petrelli shows up. Angela reminds him that deep down inside he still loves her, so Arthur cures her.

Wow. OK, Angela, now remind him that his insane quest to destroy the world is also because you two have had a tiff and...Angela? Angela!! Crap. The show goes on.

So anyway, Ando has been saddled with a Hiro that believes himself to be ten years old (Thanks to Arthur "Magneto's a lass" Petrelli).

And then at the end of the episode, everyone picks sides. The teams are:

Team Arthur
Sylar
Flint Gordon, the big dumb lunk that hurls fire.
Mohinder
Ellie Bishop
Knox
Tracy Strauss

Team Angela
- just about everyone else.

Except Hiro and Ando. So far. They used to work for Arthur, but quit.

And then in the next episode, things get stranger. An Eclipse happens and suddenly everyone loses their powers. Oh noes! This provides one really decent scene, in which Matt Parkman refuses to believe he can win his girl back without his powers and Hiro pelts him with corncobs until he smartens up.

The other thing that happens here is Sylar changes sides roughly eighty-seven times. Is he playing a complex game of his own? Is he really this easy to manipulate? Is he just a mass of conflicted broodingness? I think he's up to something, and it's amusing to see him turn into a badass (with the line "I hate heroes") just before the eclipse happens - during which Noah, the man with the Horn Rimmed Glasses and real tough guy, dislocates Sylar's shoulder and makes the badass cry like a little girl.

Claire gets shot, Arthur "Omnipotent" Petrelli makes an elementary deductive mistake based on more prescient art, and the Petrelli boys end up on Haiti arguing with each other about who the bigger jerk is. Right now, lads, I would have someone Zombie you and be done with the pair of you.

Onward to

Fringe

The premise for this show is not simple.

FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is recruited to investigate odd events that seem to form part of something called The Pattern - which suggest that someone is performing experiments on the world using rather extreme fringe science.

Olivia is pretty good stuff, actually. She's sensible, rational, passionate and clever. She's played by Anna Torv.

Olivia's team consists of a Mad Scientist, Walter Bishop. Walter (played by John Noble) has been in a lunatic asylum for the last 17 years.

If you watch this show for now other reason, do watch it for John Noble's performance. He's fab. I love Walter Bishop, who can segue from bewildered non-sequiters to towering rage in moments, and who's dialog you have to pay close attention to. The rest of the cast are more or less forgetable (apart from Astrid Fenyman, the assistant, who is a background character that needs more lines and more of a part in the show).

The ideas presented are firmly in the X-Files territory, but instead of having a spooky explanation, everything here is rooted in Science. Although there are nods to things being Odd, like the rather well done Classic MiB who shows up in the epsiode The Arrival. This is no Will Smith MiB, this is one from the annals of the Mothman reports, and the early days of UFology, and it made me rejoice to see it.

I love the show. There, I said it, and recommend it to you.

Next?

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I wouldn't have watched this at all, but Summer Glau is in it.
Anyway.
It turns out to be pretty good.

Summer Glau, "River" from Firefly, is a Terminator programmed by John Connor to protect his younger self. The show talks about Emergent Behaviour - which is when a machine that is programmed to learn does something outside the normal range of what it should do - and then uses Cameron to demonstrate this.

There is a moment where Sarah Connor sees a tortoise on it's back. She turns it over. Later, Cameron asks John why she did this and John tells her that good humans like to help when they can, and that it would have been cruel to leave the tortoise to die. Shortly thereafter, Cameron beats the pogies out of a former FBI agent while John interrogates him. Once the beating is done, Cameron looks at the agent, who is on his back in the remains of a table, and turns him onto his front before walking away.

The show is full of little moments like this, and Summer Glau is very good at them. The rest of the cast are...more or less what you'd expect.

Lena Headey has the unenviable task of playing Sarah Connor; the character is basically nuts anyway, tortured by what she believes the future holds, and has forced herself to become a steely killer. This conflicts with what the character really wants to be, which is a mother to John. It's not an easy role, especially since Sarah Connor is what you get when a woman tries to be a man - or in this case, as we saw in Terminator 2, a Terminator.

Thomas Dekker plays John Connor, and it's another one of those difficult roles to carry off; the initials JC are not a coincidence. He's going to be mankind's last hope, but when we meet him he's fifteen and already has the attitude of a combat veteran. John's character is very much darker and more troubled than the John Connor we have seen in movies, but again this seems to work well.

Watching John and Sarah in conflict about how life is to be lived is interesting, and forms part of the show's emotional conflict. There are other characters, some from the future and some not, and an interesting sideline: Shirely Manson is apparently playing a T-1001, that happens to be running a company which looks like it might want to create Skynet.

It's worth picking an episode or two to watch, simply to work out whether the show's mix of sly commentary about the future and explosions is for you. Again, I like it enough to have caught up on Season 2, but I'm not quite sure if I like the show as a whole. I shall watch more.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T21:48:00.000-08:00

This is Thanksgiving weekend, a lovely American tradition in which they celebrate something and eat a lot.

In many respects, it's like Christmas - which it's a month before - but dedicated to family. This year, people all over America will be flying and driving to be with their relatives and to spend a couple of days doing what families do.

It's bittersweet for me, because it will be my last.

By this time next year I should be back in England, for good, and no longer a husband or stepfather. My wife of six years has decided that she can't put up with me being a depressive, and whatever else I am - typically, I don't know why I'm a crap human being - and doesn't want to be married to me any more. I cannot explain how this feels, so I won't. It's hard enough to blog it, because I'm normally a quiet, private person. Ideas are for sharing, pain is not.

The plan, then, is to do the whole divorce thing and move out. I will spend several months saving like mad, and then I will leave the country, return to the UK, find a city and live in it.

My family have not spoken to me since I came out here. This has been a source of pain for some time, and they are not likely to start talking to me any time soon. They do not like me, and to be perfectly honest I am no longer all that fond of them.

I have not picked a city. I like the looks of Leicester, and Newcastle, and perhaps Birmingham. I won't make a decision about this for a while, because I don't need to. I am not looking forward to starting again, from scratch, for the third time in ten years. But I will.

I am very good at beginnings, but time is ticking on. My father died aged 49 and I wonder if I will follow him; given that I am currently a conglomeration of bad habits - and that's infuriating because the ones I want (wine, women and song) are denied me (can't drink, don't want to turn into a drunk. no more women, thanks all the same. Couldn't carry a tune in a bucket) while the ones I have (depression, a tendency to eat when depressed, a tendency to smoke instead of eat) are getting worse.

And I cannot tell you how dull this all is. Look, I hate talking about myself because I'm boring. Instead:

Don't see The Brave One. If you want to watch a movie about a vigilante gunning people down for no reason other than that it seems like a good way to make sense of the world, go and rent Death Wish. Jodie Foster is excellent, and as a study of how someone turns to violence and revenge as a way to make sense of the world this is a good character study. But character studies do not make good movies unless there is a story to be told. Here, there isn't. You want to see this done well? Watch The Dark Knight instead.

Also don't see Click because it's just It's a Wonderful Life done with considerably less charm and warmth, or even life affirming qualities. It's an Adam Sandler vehicle telling that all too familiar tale of a man who can't do everything at once but desperately needs to because his life demands and pressures him into it, and his own role as breadwinner means he needs to provide for his family. And it's dull. There are some laughs, but they are too few and far between and the best of them are delivered by Christopher Walken.
Normally I wouldn't spoil a movie, but you don't need to see it - so, it Adam Sandler - who is playing himself as usual - fast forwards through his life using a magic "universal remote" and ends up losing his wife and kids (to Sean Astin in a red speedo) whilst becoming a success at his job. Of course, this leads to him also alienating his own parents, and missing all the fun times. At the end, on his deathbed (or death tarmac, possibly, since he kicks the bucket on a road while it's raining) he passes on one scrap of wisdom to his son and expires. Only to wake up back where he started, given another chance at life with a stern injunction from the Angel of Death to do it right this time.

I also saw Sweeny Todd, with Depp and Bonham Carter and Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen...assorted others. Victorian, gloomy, lingering shots down HBC's top for no readily apparent reason, and Johnny Depp. Since he's generally worth the price of admission on his own, I thought I might like this. I was right. Well, it's the movie version of a Sondheim musical and that's also good news. The gruesomeness is gruesome. The cast are pretty decent, although I am getting a bit weary of seeing the entire cast of Harry Potter trot before my eyes - don't we have any other actors in Britain? - and although I wasn't supposed to be uplifted or cheered by this gore splashed penny dreadful, I was. So there.

It also renewed my enthusiasm for owning a straight razor. I had one once and was almost able to shave myself properly without opening an artery. I would like to master that skill, so I might go look up something special for my tonsorial arrangements.

Meat pie, anyone?

ZOMG! Cyberpunks!

2008-11-20T12:16:00.000-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7740483.stm

As the article says, the USA is under increasing threat from Chinese cyberspies.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the USA is proud of technology. And while it makes some really neat toys, neither government nor enterprise understand how to use and abuse them properly.

Second, because any human product is inherrantly flawed and an sufficiently dedicated hacker can get into just about anything given time and resources.

I say this not because I am some ub3rl33t h4x0r capable of "hacking the Gibson" or "hacking all the internets at once", but because I'm moderately I.T. aware and moderately paranoid. You build defenses expecting that some other bugger is working on ways to crack them.

In this case, if you want to secure information from cyberspies my immediate thought is "stop leaving it on vunerable networks". Print it, put it in a box, lock the box in a safe, lock the safe in a room, lock the room in a building, lock the building. This low tech solution is neither interactive nor sharing, but it will flat foot 100% of computer based hacking.

If information is sensitive, why is it being shared? If someone needs to see it, do not allow the information to go to them, make them come to the information. This is also simple, low tech, and irritatingly obvious.

In the same sense, if your government officials leave laptops full of sensitive data on the tube, take away the laptop, give the man a desktop bolted to his desk and don't let him work from home ever.

Heroes Season 3 - yet again

2008-11-13T17:57:00.000-08:00

The story continues by going backwards and filling in some backstory about the current situation.

Everything takes place during Hiro's visionquest and we assume we are viewing the true facts of the events depicted. We've rolled back two years, watching the early events of the first season, knowing what we now know about the Petrellis, the guy with the Horn Rim Glasses, Sylar and the rest of the gang.

It's sort of an Origin story episode.

Over the last couple of weeks we have seen the Petrelli family a'fightin' and a feudin', so it was probably about time that we discovered why. Everything hinges around Arthur and Angela Petrelli, their plans to take over the world (or something) and their difference of opinion.

Arthur dominates his wife and family, literally messing with Angela's head any time she takes against him. He plans to kill Nathan, has Linderman attempt to do so, and is poisoned by Angela. We know he survives.

We also see Sylar attempt to kill himself, and be forced into becoming the relentless and unstoppable killer we came to know and love by HRG (who is busily manipulating things behind the scenes).

At least this week we get to spend relatively long periods of time with the characters. There's plenty of attention given to the Petrelli family, and in fact to the extended family given that we now know Sylar is in fact Gabriel Petrelli.

This should be a low key episode, and it more or less is. It's nice seeing Zachary Quinto turn Gabriel Gray into Sylar, it's also nice to see how much of a bastard Arthur Petrelli is.

Eric Roberts is in this too, as an Ageny for The Company, and Christopher Eccleston's character gets a mention.

And since this is all a vision quest, we're not overly concerned with Suresh turning into a monthter, or Peter turning into Sylar, or adding anything to the story at all. Until the last few seconds, when it all seems to go terribly pear shaped for Hiro.

Somehow, the threat to Hiro and the "origin" of Sylar are the most compelling threads of the whole episode. Gabriel Gray is a harmless enough guy who attempts to kill himself after he kills someone with an ability because he's unable to cope with his own feelings of guilt and remorse. This sort of makes sense, seems to be a good start point, feels right.

And it turns out that Clint, the guy in level 5 that can throw fire, is the brother of Meredith - Claire's biological mother.

- as an aside, will you please look at the amount of SOPE! in this storyline? If this was Doctor Who, people would be up in arms about the interrelationships of characters.

I, on the other hand, am sort of digging it.

Good Books

2008-11-02T19:59:00.001-08:00

I don't just watch TV and fret about politics.

The book I absorbed today was The Knight in Battle, a non-fiction work examining the changes in medieval warfare from the 1100s to the 1500s. The author, a titan of a chap called William Ewart Oakeshott, who alas died in 2002 before I could find him and thank him for being brilliant.

In the course of the book we get a looksee at Richard the Lionheart vs Saladin, the Battle of Lincoln Fayre (featuring the always awesome William Marshall) a glimpse of Bayard and the changes rise of the Swiss pikeman.

Oakeshott's scholarly abilities are never in doubt; his writing style is lively and engaging to the point of his works being collector's items for me. You never have a moment's doubt that he loves this subject completely, that he understands how to present it to the people who are new to the material and that he wants you to engage with it and learn more. In short, he's a joy to read.

For example, in describing the battle of Lincoln in 1217, Oakeshott throws us a quick appreciation of Bad Prince John - who was definitely bad, and yet also a really very competent soldier and strategist. If all you ever see of Prince John is the man being baffled by Robin Hood and standing in the shadow of Coeur De Lion, it's not surprising he gets a raw deal. Oakeshott drags him out of the shadows and lets us get a good look at the King who lost his country and then fought like a man possessed to keep it away from the French.

Oakeshott is deft, clever, witty and warm and any of his books are heartily recommended.

Halloween Viewing

2008-11-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

Every Halloween, my family has a tradition: junk food and scary movies.

This year, we gave Emily (our eldest) the job of picking out the movies we'd watch, because on the whole she has good taste in films.

The Happening was up first.

M Night. Shal..whatsisname rarely lets us down, and The Happening is a departure from his recognised formula; there is no discernible twist, so what we get is a straight story with characters and a situation. The Happening is a nice little ecological parable, with the Gaia Hypothesis at the core. What happens when the planet decides it's had enough of humanity?

The human story at the core is low key; a high school science teacher and his wife, who may be having relationship problems, are forced to care for a young child and attempt to survive a situation which pits them against human nature and Mother Nature.

The teacher, Eliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) are isolated from the herd of humanity by an ever decreasing circle of horror. Humans aren't a herd animal, but we are social creatures, and one of the things the movie exposes is the smallest common denominator of human society - the family. As the events of The Happening close in around the characters they are forced closer and closer together, finding strength in each other and growing to accept their feelings for one another.

In some senses, this is a cliche. Rarely do we see a Situation Movie where the estranged male and female leads don't come out of it with renewed bonds of love. In another sense, though, the movie shows us what we are at the core: a society of families, with the bonds that we choose to make being the most enduring and important to us as individuals. We also get a long, hard look at trust and friendship - again, choices that we make which are far more solid under pressure than we might initially believe.

The Happening is chilling in a very small scale way, and although the movie has been roundly panned by critics, professional and otherwise, it works. Wahlberg plays against type, his character isn't a hero and instead comes across as an intelligent and earnest man out of his depth. There are no heroics here, he doesn't save the day, the decisions he makes are small on the global scale but intensely personal and all the more interesting for that.

I enjoyed the movie, not because of the scare factor - Shyamalan uses the R rating to show grisly death after grisly death, although with a remarkble lack of gratuitous gore, using the horror to underline the hopeless nature of the crisis. It also works better because of the lack of twist. This defeat of expectation is probably why a lot of people felt let down, but that's a good thing: directors and movies should not be product.

The Strangers is torture porn. Although scary, tense and well constructed after watching the film I couldn't find a reason for it to exist.

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a couple who have just had one of those relationship mis-steps, where one person wants a deeper level of committment than the other, and don't know what to do in order to resolve this issue. Luckily for them, they are subjected to psychological and physical peril by a trio of roving psychopaths and this solves to resolve them both to love each other, shortly before being butchered.

And that's it. The scares are of the "boo!" variety, there is a load of creeping menace that is deftly and unnervingly put together which keeps you either on the edge of your seat or forces you to curl up in the back of it. All well and good, but the movie doesn't do anything else. It's entertainment of a form I am deeply uncomfortable with - for one thing, it's based on a true story and, at the very beginning, tells you that no one is quite sure of the events that took place that fateful night. Which tells me that our lead characters don't, in fact, make it out alive. With this knowledge in place, with almost no script and therefore no real character development possible, all we're left with is being helpless witnesses to an episode of insane brutality.

The one bright spark is Liv Tyler, who manages to create an emotional journey for her character and who stands out as the one reason to watch the movie at all. But not more than once.

Oh, and as noted above, the couple do come out of the situation with renewed ties and love. They just don't get to enjoy it.

The Mist is a Stephen King yarn, dealing with the ties that hold communities together when faced with things beyond their understanding. There are tentacles, a base under seige, religious mania and claustrophobia - a neat examination of modern America in the face of the War on Terror, in fact.

I will actually review it when I have watched it at not 2am, and when I can remember more than that initial paragraph. It should be noted, however, that the direction and acting are enough for me to want to see it again. Good movie.

Iron Man we got because Dad is a geek and on a superhero kick.

Yes, it's a popcorn movie and yes, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have created yet another flawed hero who is, nevertheless, a hero. It's a tale about responsibility, power and really neat technology and it has everything I wanted from an Iron Man movie. Robert Downey Jr. was a perfect choice for Tony Stark; I think Hollywood has caught on to the big point about superhero flicks, that beneath the fights and the cool stuff these are stories about people and their choices. We've seen it in The Dark Knight and we see it again in Iron Man, but in both situations it;s not as forced or rammed down our necks as it has been in the Spider Man sequels: with great power comes great responsibility. Shouldering that responsibility is the mark of a hero, at least according to Marvel.

It works.

If you aren't interested in that, RDJ and the movie deliver on absolutely every other score. The action is pacey and suitably huge. The technology is cool, and it's fun that Stark has a better relationship with his household robots than he does with the people around him. Watching him attempt to break out of this situation is as entertaining as the CGI antics of the suit of armour.

My one gripe is that the trailer used "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath for Tony's breakout from his terrorist captors - which was a 'punch the air' moment, but the movie leaves this music for the end titles. A shame, it worked better in the trailer.

An excellent blockbuster, with loads of room for sequels and extrapolations, and RDJ is apparently on the Tony Stark gravy train for at least another three films, which makes me happy because he has the character down to a tee and is extremely watchable.

And that'll do for now.

The Next Doctor

2008-11-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

So, in 2010 we get a new Doctor. Well, the tail end of 2009 really.

Much is being made, in fandom, of who the next chap will be. Some interesting names are being kicked around, including a couple of black actors, and some parts of fandom are not entirely happy with that possibility.

Being charitable, I'd say they've fallen into the trap of "tradition" (a thing that is done because we've forgotten the reasons for doing it that way in the first place). The Doctor has always been a white guy, therefore he should continue being a white guy.

Which isn't really much of an argument.

My point of view is that the role should go to someone who is going to get the most out of it as an actor, someone who will hopefully stick with it for more than one season and someone who will be entertaining. The final choice of actor doesn't matter to me outside these criteria.

I'd like to see David Tennant's replacement last longer than a season simply because The Doctor is important to people. Give the actor a chance to get into the role, to become "my Doctor" for another set of fans, to do something interesting with the part. That's going to take more than one season.

Plus, I'm a fan. I like a bit of longevity in my Doctors. From the little I've seen of Patrick Troughton, I find myself wishing he'd done another year (if only to ensure that more of his tenure survived the great episode cull), but that's just a side effect of me really enjoying his performance and wanting more. I think David Tennant, like Patrick Troughton, has a shrewd eye on his career and has made the right decision for himself and his future - and I can hardly blame him for that, especially given all the fun he's provided over the last few years.

If you really want to speculate, you can probably narrow down the range given the comments made by the cast and crew over the last couple of years, but beyond that I don't really want to investigate too deeply.

Because for me, there's still something magic about regeneration. In a way, I'm hoping they keep this a secret until we actually see the regeneration around Christmas 2009. I'm looking forward to being surprised, and slightly wrong footed, by the choice. Looking at regenerations past -

- actually, one of my first memories of the show is watching the Pertwee/Baker regeneration scene and being curious, a little surprised, and a bit upset that the Doctor was changing. I was equally emotional over the change from Tom Baker to Peter Davison, and once again when Davison became Colin Baker. I was utterly nonplussed at the choice of Sylvester McCoy but by the time he changed into Paul McGann I didn't want him to go either. All the way through my time with the show, I've been enthralled and saddened when one actor bows out and another takes his place.

That magic remains.

In the end, it doesn't matter who plays the Doctor and in all honesty skin colour is probably the single least important aspect of the person who steps into the role next. Time and again, we've been shown that the writing, the ability of the actor and the dedication of the production team are what make the show captivating. As long as the folks in charge of the casting process are aware of this, I feel that they'll make the best decision for the show as an entity. If they want to do something non-traditional, I'm more than happy with that. Things that don't evolve tend to stagnate and a stagnant Doctor Who isn't good for anyone.

General Roundup

2008-10-30T20:56:00.001-07:00

The Current Book: Snowcrash

Again. To be honest, I am a sucker for cyberpunk and virtuality but even more of a sucker for the core of the book- the concept of language as a virus. One thing that always grips me is a book with a powerful idea at the core, which is why I spent so much time with Hard SF and why books like Snowcrash keep me coming back to see if there are any bits that I have missed.

I also read The Government Manual for New Superheroes which has been sitting on a shelf feeling unloved. I went through a phase of collecting small and not very serious books like that a while ago and, given the rather obvious nature of the book itself, it raises the odd smile here and there.

The Current Tunes: A Tribute to Chairman Humph

A Radio 4 tribute to Humphrey Littleton, one of those people who's contribution to life you really don't assess until they're gone. The tribute, narrated by Stephen Fry and with contributions from the likes of Barry Cryer, Jack Dee, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor et al, painted a vivid picture of Chairman Humph as a person and as a gentleman. Most telling of all, an anecdote about the man himself on VE day, being wheeled around London in a cart and playing his trumpet. Amazingly, a BBC recording of a commentator overlooking the scene at the gates of Buckingham Palace captures Humph playing the trumpet. In amongst the crowd noise and under the terribly serious tones of a BBC voice long gone, you can make out the sound of "Roll Out the Barrell" and of a crowd singing along.

The Current TV: No Heroics

Since I seem to be on a superhero kick, I thought I'd do a little digging and see what all the fuss is about.
I must be getting old.
The amount of profanity nearly put me off, until I tuned it out. It's...crude, sometimes funny, with large chunks of pathos and some genuinely amusing moments; superheroes can't get their lives together either, it seems, and are as ill-adjusted and uncomfortable as the rest of us.

I knew this.

Well, when you grow up reading reprints of Marvel comics (and Spiderman in particular) the concept that a superhero is all coolness when the mask is on and yet as tenative and insecure as real people in day to day life is simply not news. For the rest of the population who are currently superhero aware thanks to the likes of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and who have no real investment in the genre, it's probably funnier.

Mind you, there was this anthology...a while back...with contributions from people like Gaiman and David Langford, called Temps. I feel sure that the writers of No Heroics are familiar with it.

Heroes, Season 3, again

2008-10-29T19:15:00.000-07:00

At last, Heroes seems to be attempting to tie things together into one coherent plot and with a bit of luck that will make for some interaction between the various characters and stories.

They are still doing the "and now, twenty seconds with Suresh! Followed by eight seconds of Sylar!" thing, which is still getting on my nerves. I would love to spend more time in the company of Hiro, or any of the characters really, because as it stands the nature of the show means I really don't know most of the characters. Developing powers have replaced developing characters.

For example, Nathan Petrelli (the flying politico) started out the season convinced, utterly, that his power was a gift from God. That idea has been rather brusquely discarded, in favour of a more scientific explanation and Nathan's character has likewise reverted. What if, even faced with the truth about the source of his power, he continues to believe? As it stands, Nathan Petrelli seems to have shaken off his brush with God in short order; to me this says that he was never that convinced about it in the first place, so can I trust anything about this person? Who is he, really?

The story, such as it is, now appears to revolve around the Petrelli family and an internal feud between mother and father, tugging the kids (Nathan, Peter and Sylar) in different directions. The good news is there are indications that Sylar, now recruited by his Dad, isn't playing the same game as everyone else; the analogy is that while Mr and Mrs Petrelli are playing chess with the assorted characters, Sylar is now playing Poker and has been smart enough to mark the cards without telling anyone.

Peter Petrelli has been a bit of a headless chicken since the start of the season and is still hyperventillating his way through scenes. I feel that if he would just stop for a moment and catch his breath, and perhaps do some actual thinking, he might be a bit more interesting and a lot more useful. As it is, he lurches from one crisis to the next without ever really having a plan. This is all good stuff if you want your hero to be a reactionary mess, complete with knee-jerk responses that seem to come out of nowhere, but less good if you're hoping he might be a character you identify with and want to see succeed. He's outplayed and outclassed by everyone else, never seems to catch a break and instead of being the audience identification character is more a sort of mobile punchbag.

Is it good, though?

Well...yes, sort of. I do hope they wrap this story up, though, because I'm not sure it's good enough for a Season 4.

Superheroes come to feast...

2008-10-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

Superheroes are being gleefully strip-mined by Hollywood and just about everyone else.

Adrien Veidt would point out that in times of economic hardship, we turn to symbols of strength and solidity as well as escapism for entertainment. After the glut of Reality shows, perhaps we as consumers are ready for things to be more fantastic and less about the humdrum?

It helps that Hollywood seems to have picked some decent projects and seems to want to take them seriously - at least for a given value of "serious". A case in point, "The Dark Knight", which has the advantage of being about normal humans. Strip away the Batman stuff and you have a good, soild, mob thriller. Get rid of Batman and the Joker, and the idea of the movie playing out with Harvey, Rachel and Jim Gordon in the spotlight still works. Nolan's use of real locations gives the movie a grounding in reality that Burton's Gotham didn't have, and I'm pretty sure that Gotham was always based on an uneasy amalgam of New York and Chicago anyway.

Adding Batman and the Joker gives the movie another layer, pushes it into interesting and mythic territory. And let's be honest, the ongoing twisted romance between the Joker and Batman is the one relationship in the film - and the one relationship in the comics - that the fans really care about. I was pleased that Nolan allowed the Joker to say it in such loving terms, turning the idea of being completed by another person firmly on it's head. Bruce Wayne wants to be completed by Rachel, sees her as his safe haven, his Penelope.

The moment we know that Rachel is what Bruce is looking forward to is the moment we should realise that she's doomed. It's almost a war movie cliche - the war weary soldier drawing strength from the knowledge that the girl he left behind is still waiting for him.

Coming up, of course, is the Other Great Graphic Novel: Watchmen.

It's going to make an interesting movie. The characters, in their graphic novel form, are not the superheroes we're used to seeing. Batman might be an extremist, but he still has rules and he's still recognisably human. Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, even The Comedian and Ozymandias are already a long way away from that state when the story begins. The other characters are even less of the heroic norm, which makes me wonder whether the movie will use Dan Dreiberg as the audience identification character.

Frankly, if there are still people out there who think Rorschach has an identifiable point of view, I don't want to know. Even the happy nihilism of the Comedian is uncomfortable.

This might be why it's taken so long to get the movie made. Not all of the issues in turning that book into a motion picture are to do with the technology and the technique. Alan Moore created a dense, literate, intelligent story that should more or less defy translation and, like a lot of "the movie of the book" situations some of it certainly will.

Perhaps the way to think about this is to look back at Stallone's "Judge Dredd". Without judging the man too harshly, one of his reported comments was that he didn't understand where the humour was in the script, felt that a comic book of that nature ought to be more broadly funny, which might explain why the movie captured some of the look but none of the edge. What didn't translate was the idea that you shouldn't like Dredd, that Dredd was, in fact, the embodiment of everything that is wrong with MegaCity One, and that he's a cold, mudering bastard.

That people liked him for it is perhaps a bit of a tragedy, or just shows that what Pratchett said about humans getting carried away by any new idea which includes a uniform and a slogan is true.

Dredd, Rorschach, the Comedian, Batman, the Joker...they all have something in common.
They believe. Utterly and completely, they believe in something. It can be hard to disagree with their point of view when it's presented in such a stark fashion, and there is something about that steely belief which lends them a charisma that they shouldn't have, or at least bends our will far enough out of shape that we begin to find their dissonant views harmonising with ours. Yeah, criminals. They probably deserve a kicking. Or shooting. Yeah, torture. Justified, as long as we're only doing it to bad people, and only to get information to prevent worse crimes. Yeah.

So perhaps the current infatuation with Superheroes is more of a reflection of the times than we thought?

For Real?

A Crocodile Dundee Moment

Begun, the media snark has

Hacked Hacks Pack!

Who Hacks the Hacks?

Shakespeare in Klingon

Doctor Who?

Hands in pockets, mooching about

Novelist

I should do this more often

Science fiction triple feature

Gosh, I've really let this go, haven't I?

So here it is, Merry Christmas...

From the Drafty Garrett

Settling In

In Leicestershire Ego Est

Stumbling from the wreckage

So much for the cunning plan.

Keeping the Faith

Amendment I

Artists? Making money? That'll never catch on!

I quit!

Series Cancellations, TV Conservatism and The BBC

I was writing

Top 25 Who Stories

The Government really needs a good firing.

James Murdoch Hates The BBC.

Updatingness, and stuff, and vampires and Star Trek

Craftsman, Artist or Professional?

Digital Britain: Rant Warning. Sweariness ahoy.

I own an e-book reader!

Published and Paid!

Quick and Dirty Blog Post. No, not that kind of dirty. Honestly, minds in the gutter, the lot of you.

The New Word Order

Gubbins

Swine Flu 2

Swine Flu Fever

Weird Dave is Weird.

"No taxation without representation", they told their elected representatives...

Good Old Victor F.

#Amazonfail

The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Terminated?

The Perils of No TV

Work E-Mail

Blog Announcement!

Kindles, Text to Speech and Audiobooks, oh my!

What If? - Pinecones.

Shoe Disaster

Rend! Tear! Fold! Spindle!

Damn you, BSG, Damn you!!!

The Lifeboat

The End of Battlestar Galactica

glædmód

I never know how to deal with things like this, hence the rambly title

Teach Me 'ow To Be King?

Retrospectively speaking

I Think I Might Be Evil.

Mr. Ebert, what have you done?

Author! Author!

Hurm

Invaders Must Die!

Technical Hitches

Insomnia TV again

Awesome Thought of the Week

Books vs Internet/Digital text

Bothersome

It's been a while...

Won't get fooled again (waaaaaaaaoooooooo!)

Important Announcement.

President Obama

Battlestar Galactica - worth the wait?

The Stock Market! It's happening again!

The return of insomnia

The Brightonomicon

The Obligatory Matt Smith Post

A Slight Case of Block

2008..in review

The Next Doctor

'Twas Christmas Day in the Workhouse

Domestic bliss?