Archive for June, 2007
Compensation culture comes to Scotland
Daily Record, via Fark:
A STUDENT left paralysed after falling 30 feet from scaffolding on a night out is suing the firm who put it up.
Ross Campbell says K2 Specialist Services should accept some blame for his accident because their scaffolding was too accessible and unsteady.
He said: “I want to know where the share of the blame lies.”
Unless there’s more to this story than the Record is reporting - such as the scaffolding firm putting big signs up saying “free climbing frame! Particularly good if you’re pissed!” - then it’s pretty obvious where the blame lies, isn’t it?
Balance (or: stop giving nut-jobs a voice)
Imagine you’re a journalist, writing a story about the families who lost loved ones in 9/11. Would you print the views of someone who said that 9/11 never happened, and that the families were all part of a zionist plot, in the interests of balance? Or let’s say you’re writing about the deaths of soldiers in Iraq. Would you quote Fred Phelps, the loathsome arse who pickets funerals because “God Hates Fags”, in the interests of balance? Of course you wouldn’t, because these people are nutjobs who deserve (at best) pity, not publicity.
So why, when we’re talking about vaccinating kids against cancer, do papers interview Christian Voice?
Devil’s Kitchen is on the case, and he’s using even more swear words than usual. And while he’s being a tad unfair - he’s using the term Christians to refer to a small subset of idiots whose views, I hope, aren’t representative of mainstream Christian views - he’s nailed the “vaccination will turn kids into tarts” argument.
For crying out loud, we don’t complain that people who are given a tetanus or rabies jab will deliberately go out and encourage a dog to bite them, do we?
I laughed so hard at that, coffee came out of my nose.
The problem with this story is that the “balance” means the debate we’re getting isn’t the right one. The “will the jag cause promiscuity?” thing is a non-issue, but it’s taking column inches that would be better spent on more serious questions such as: is the vaccine as effective as the manufacturer claims it is? If a child is vaccinated at 12, will there need to be a booster shot a few years later - and if so, what do we need to do to make sure those shots happen at the right time? Are there any potential side effects that mean, for example, that some kids shouldn’t be vaccinated?
Everything else is just noise.
What I really want in Leopard
Per-application volume control. Not the Tiger approach - you have one volume control for system alerts and one for everything else - but the Windows Vista approach, where you can set individual volume levels for different things. That way when some arse embeds audio in their site or Flash ad, it doesn’t play at the same ridiculous volume as the music you’ve been listening to.
Not a particularly interesting post, I’ll admit. But that little change would make the internet much more pleasant.
Minor irritations
* Inbound sales calls that say “we’re with X firm” and want to talk about my mobile phone upgrade/the end of my warranty on whatever. You’re bloody liars. You’re a third party and you’ve been given my details by Orange/Sky/whoever despite my careful ticking of the opt-out boxes on absolutely everything. I’d complain to all kinds of people if I weren’t so busy. Gaaaah.
* Glamorous by Fergie, the hard-faced one out of Black Eyed Peas. Most of her solo stuff is annoying, but this one’s even more so because I keep thinking she’s nicked the chorus from “tropical iceland” (might not be the right title) by indie band Fiery Furnaces. Maybe she has.
* Online shops that hate customers. To cut a very long story short I’ve been waiting two weeks now for a next day delivery. I called at the weekend (it’s a big shop as well as an online one) and everybody who deals with internet sales was off, so they’d get someone to call me. No call. Called the helpline, and a recorded message told me to piss off (”All enquiries must be by email”). Checked the website, which provides 342 different email addresses and states that if you don’t use the correct one for your enquiry, you can piss off. Used the right one. No reply so far. I wouldn’t mind if they DIDN’T ALREADY HAVE MY SODDING MONEY.
* Co-codamol. It’s shit! What’s the point of a painkiller that has no effect on pain? Handy hint: supermarket own-brand painkillers rock. Especially the paracetamol/aspirin dual-drug ones. Although they probably rot your insides.
* Mobile phone bills. How is it possible that you can have an all-inclusive bundle of minutes each month that covers every eventuality, yet when you get the bill every call you make isn’t included in that bundle? People have gone stark staring mad trying to decipher mobile phone terms and conditions.
* The “pearl” bit of the Blackberry Pearl. Incoming call - answer or ignore? Answer! Arse! It bloody scrolled and hit ignore! This happens every single time.
* Pretty much everything else on the planet, really.
Manhunt 2 “banned by the BBFC”
The problem with censor-baiting games is that sometimes, you can take it too far.
Rockstar Games’ Manhunt 2 has achieved the dubious honour of being only one of two games to be refused a rating in the UK.
…
The reasoning behind the decision is that, according to BBFC director David Cooke, “Manhunt 2 is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing. There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game.”
Cooke says that the decision is not one that the board has taken lightly, and that where possible it considers cuts or modifications to the game to remove offensive material. However, in the case of Manhunt 2 “this has not been possible.”
Of course, this is great publicity for the game outside the UK - if other countries don’t ban it too. That’s a big if.
The following day…
The reaction to this on the various gaming sites has been interesting and pretty predictable: OMG WTF CENSURSHIP and so on. But I think a lot of people are missing the point. The BBFC has a pretty clear set of rules about what is and what isn’t acceptable, Manhunt 2 goes beyond them, and the BBFC feels that if the game were to be cut so it *did* fit the rules then there wouldn’t be any game left.
The BBFC isn’t in the banning business, it’s in the cutting business. Month after month, film directors crow in the movie mags about the stuff they’re trying to get past the censors and the stuff they had to cut. It’s a constant battle, with filmmakers pushing as hard as they can and the BBFC reining them back in. That rarely takes the form of a ban; it’s more likely to be “no, that scene goes too far, you need to cut it”.
Rockstar has expressed its surprise at the decision, and its surprise at the US adults-only rating that could mean commercial death (mainstream retailers don’t stock AO titles). Methinks they doth protest too much. The whole ethos of Manhunt is to push against the boundaries of what is and isn’t allowed, and it seems that this time they’ve pushed a wee bit too far.
I think that’s better than the alternative: media scaremongering leading to knee-jerk legislation. I wrote last week about games for grown-ups such as Bioshock, and I can guarantee you that in a video-nasty climate Bioshock could fall foul of a “ban this sick filth” crusade. It’s no headline-chasing “look how sick we are” gore-fest (which is why I really hope it’s as good as it has the potential to be), but that doesn’t matter: this preview from Eurogamer shows how easily a game that’s designed to challenge the player with tough moral choices could be misinterpreted. In one section, the gamer has the choice of saving or harvesting a crucial chemical from a Little Sister, a “genetically modified freak” that nevertheless is a child:
“How can you do this to a child?!”
Um…
How could I? Oh God. But… But wasn’t all this caused by her own hand? And how else can I save his family? And myself? “You’re the only hope of me seeing my wife again,” he says. That’s not much of a choice is it? Besides, how can that thing still be called a child?
I’ve just harvested my first Little Sister. And it’s one of the most arresting gaming moments I’ve experienced in a long time. Earlier this evening, Bioshock creator Ken Levine, facing the same choice, saved her.
…
We grab the girl and draw her right up to us. She’s screaming, fear etched into her face, hopelessly, pathetically writhing and trying to push us away. “No! No! NOOO!” She still seems pretty human to us…
Sod it. “Harvest”.
The hysterical child moves briefly out of view, there’s a skin-crawlingly grotesque sound effect and… Well, you’ll want to see this for yourselves.
“How could you do this to a child?!”
As one commenter notes:
Daily mail are gonna have a field day with this.
I’m sure they will, but I’m also sure that the BBFC will give Bioshock whatever rating they think is appropriate and defend it if there’s a media storm. They did with Rockstar’s Canis Canem Edit (aka Bully), after all.
WTF?
You need to see the photo accompanying this Sun article.
[Via Fark]
iPhones, imperial overstretch and Google buying Apple
All in one utterly fascinating article by John Heilemann.
A new Opera Mini is out
One for the mobile internet users: the beta of Opera Mini 4 is now available for download. I love Mini and the new features look good, but there’s a temporary issue with the Blackberry Pearl so I can’t run it just yet. If anyone’s given it or is planning to give it a go, I’d be interested in your comments…
The Daily Mail and Scottish independence
My Dad was down south for a bit, and got his usual paper: the Daily Mail (we have very different tastes in media, I must stress). But it wasn’t his usual paper, because at home he gets the Scottish edition. Down south, he got - of course - the English one. Some of it was the same, so you got the usual “did fish gods build the pyramids?*” features and the incomprehensibly popular “Women! You’re fat and ugly unless you buy this expensive quackery!” sections, but the one big difference between our edition and the national one was the anti-Scottish anger.
(Incidentally my dad’s basically apolitical and couldn’t care less either way, so we’re not talking about a rabid Scotsman looking for bias in the sassenach press. Particularly as he’s an Englishman. He was quite taken aback by the tone of the coverage.)
It’s something some of you have commented on here before, but from what I’ve seen online - as far as I can tell newspaper sites don’t differentiate between Scots and English visitors, so the versions I see are, I assume, the English versions rather than the localised ones - it’s getting increasingly serious. It may have started as an attempt to get Labour, but it does look like it’s gathering a momentum of its own.
The majority of Scots may be against independence, but if the Mail’s correctly judged the national mood then it may not be a case of Scots demanding a separate country; it’ll be the rest of the UK telling us to piss off. And you can be sure that’s something the new SNP administration will be doing their damndest to encourage.
* I’ve nicked that from somewhere. Jeremy Hardy, maybe?
Blinking lights (for me)
According to a new survey, half of Britons wouldn’t be able to carry on without email - which suggests that as a society, we’re in thrall to the blinking red LED. I used to be, but despite carrying a Blackberry around with me I’m pretty sure I could exist without it. The secret is the Turn Wireless Off button.
It’s difficult to overstate how wonderful Turn Wireless Off really is. With one click, the phone’s radio features shut down. That means no incoming calls. No text messages. No emails. It’s particularly good at the moment because I’m working really weird hours thanks to back pain: I’m waking up stupidly early, working like a dog while the rest of the world is quite rightly in bed, and by mid-afternoon I’m dead on my feet. Turn Wireless Off, 20 minute power nap, back to work again. Brilliant, and the only thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t Turn Real Life Off too (sod’s law says that just as you’re getting into that warm, woozy, drifting off zone, someone will call the landline or knock on the door).
Always-on email, like SMS, instant messaging and other things that go “bong” and interrupt what you’re doing, is fine in theory but shite in practice. That’s because you have them so you don’t miss anything important, but the majority of what you get is unimportant - and you have no way of knowing whether it’s an essential notification or a load of crap until you shift your attention and read it.
The rule’s straightforward enough. If the notification ruins something - so a chat invite gets you killed at a crucial point in an Xbox game, or if an MSN invite interrupts a really amazing train of thought you were about to put in an article, or an SMS bongs just as you’re drifting off for a nap, it’s going to be something that doesn’t matter. Which explains why, when I’m working, I don’t have instant messaging software or Skype running; when I’m reading a hotly anticipated new novel the phone’s off, and so on.
You can try to filter it, of course, although that takes time. My Blackberry internet service enables me to set filters so only messages that meet particular criteria get sent through to the phone. Which is great, until you miss a really urgent mail because it didn’t meet the criteria. So you widen them, and widen them, and widen them until your entire inbox goes to the phone - so you can chuckle at blog comments when you’re on the bus, or answer work queries while you’re sitting in a building before a meeting, or anything else useful.
But the notification bong that tells you about these things also tells you about every bloody WordPress “I think this is a spam, so I’ve quarantined it” notification, and every special offer from Tesco, and every incomprehensible press release sent to you because, hey, you’re a journalist and you’re bound to be interested in the latest management reshuffle in a company you haven’t heard of, in an industry you don’t cover, in jargon you don’t understand. Which is sent to you sixty-three times because you haven’t replied and the person sending it is worried you didn’t get it the first sixty-two times.
Sorry, went off on one there. Back to the point.
Always on sucks, and it’s going to suck more as it becomes integrated into more of the things we do each day. Take Xbox Live, for example. Game updates? Yes please. Notifications that people I know are online? No thank you. Messages telling me new downloadable content that I won’t buy is now available for me not to buy? Oh, please. But that’s the future. Soon, it won’t just be your phone or your IM software going bong. It’ll be your car, your TV, your iPod (or who knows? Might be your Zune!), your bloody cooker for all I know.
Ultimately the tech we buy to make our lives more pleasant ends up turning on us. Which is why everybody responsible for Sky+ should be killed.
Bear with me on this.
Sky+ is, of course, brilliant (excepting its inability to understand the concept of double bills. Sky+! I want to record the double bill of Scrubs on Paramount each week! Sky+ does not understand!) but of late, it’s showing signs of rebellion. I don’t record much - The Apprentice, Scrubs when it’s on, Penn & Teller and that’s about it - but of late, it’s started to make grumbling noises during the day. So I’m sitting there, taking a bit of time to have some peace and quiet thanks to Turn Wireless Off, and suddenly: whooooooEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Because everything is calm and quiet, before long that WhooooEEEEEE becomes as annoying as someone test-firing a Jumbo jet engine in your living room.
It seems the culprit is AnyTime TV, a new addition to the Sky+ menu that records programmes I might be interested in. And by “might be interested in”, I mean “not interested in at all”. You know the stuff: Extreme Cake Makeover and crap like that. It’s all rubbish, and it’s having a noticeable effect on the hard disk space. You’ve recorded three episodes of The Apprentice! Your hard disk is 99% full! So it’s annoying me with its noise, it’s annoying me with its presence - it’s got a red button, so I can’t help myself; I have to look to make sure it hasn’t recorded something really important that I might otherwise have missed - and now, it’s annoying me in a whole new way. The other night it actually recorded something I would be interested in seeing: a longer cut of the film The Abyss. Wahey! Technology works! Or at least, it would but AnyTime TV tells me that the programme is on a channel I don’t subscribe to, so I can’t watch it.
How brilliant is that? My Sky+ box has evolved, so instead of recording programmes I don’t *want* to watch, it’s recording programmes I *can’t* watch. I am being taunted by consumer electronics!
I know what’s next: it’s going to get social networking features. Mark my words, it’s just a matter of time before the ending of House gets a brand new soundtrack: bong! Bong! Bongily bongily bong bong bong!
PS: To be fair, you can opt out of AnyTime TV if it’s bugging you. The option’s in the Services menu of your Sky box.