Some interesting articles I found on the internet

What next for Blu-Ray?

…Blu-ray must be marketed, merchandised and—most importantly—priced for what it is, not for what the industry might wish it were.

What it is, is a fancy DVD player for those who want to get the most out of their HDTV sets.

Popjustice on the collapse of Zavvi:

You can complain about Zavvi as much as you like – and we have done – but its disappearance from high streets is terrible for music. With Woolworths also going, it means that supermarkets will overnight become even more powerful not just at dictating what music people buy but also – this is the important bit – which artists record labels sign and what music they produce.

Broadstuff: Will user-generated media drown itself?

Essentially, what user generated content does is to take the workload from the editor, and puts it on the end user in the form of a lower signal to noise ratio that reqires the user to do the filtering and editing. There is a limit to how much time people can spend doing this, however. Attention time has a hard stop.

The Guardian: internet age ratings, oh dear oh dear oh dear:

people won’t even do that for browser compatibility, which arguably has more effect on the accessibility of their sites, so they’re not going to do it for one country’s desire for “appropriateness”.

The London Review of Books on gaming as an art form:

The trouble with these games – the majority of them – isn’t that they are maladapted to the real world, it’s that they’re all too well adapted. The people who play them move from an education, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, to a work life, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, and for recreation sit in front of a computer screen and play games full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others. Most video games aren’t nearly irresponsible enough.

And a superbly opinionated presentation on the problem with ARGs (Alternate Reality Games).

If I see another broadcaster or, well, anyone, proclaim that the future of entertainment is something like Lonelygirl or KateModern or some other tv show on the web, I’ll kill a broadcaster, thus in the long run doing something concrete to deal with my rage.

‘Tis the season to shout at shop assistants

The supermarkets are full from 8am, pensioners are stealing turkeys from each other’s trolleys, and people are reacting entirely rationally to the two-day closure of the shops by buying a year’s supply of absolutely everything. What joy!

There was a particularly nice example of Xmas spirit in the supermarket earlier. A woman was packing her groceries, and as she did so, the man on the checkout was asking her the usual stuff – whether she was having a big Christmas or a quiet one, that sort of thing. Which prompted the next woman in the queue (best described using the scots phrase “torn-faced boot”) to yell at the checkout man. She didn’t have time for this, apparently, and shot dirty looks at both customer and checkout man until the transaction was completed. What a lovely way to start the day.

If I were the checkout man I’d have deliberately mucked up torn-face’s payment and shouted “DECLINED!” at the top of my voice, or rubbed her card on the magnetic security thing that eats credit cards, or smacked her in the chops with a frozen turkey, or bounced a few tins of beans off her head. So it’s probably for the best that I don’t work in retail.

Anyway, I hope you’re all organised for Christmas, that you have a wonderful time, that Santa’s good to you and that you don’t have to be within 100 miles of dour-faced buggers like auld torn-face. And if you do have to spend Christmas with dour-faced buggers like auld torn-face, why not kill them?

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Hallelujah

Popjustice nails it:

The fact of the matter here is that the best ever version of ‘Hallelujah’ was by Jeff Buckley and the worst ever version of ‘Hallelujah’ is Bono’s. Every other version of ‘Hallelujah’ between now and the end of time will sit somewhere between those two recordings.

As for whichever ‘crusades’ are currently running regarding the Buckley version – apparently there’s one in The Sun – we fail to grasp how any of this is a ‘real victory for real music over Simon Cowell’s plastic pop rubbishzzzzzz’ given that none of it would be happening without The X Factor. “Readers! Let’s really teach Simon Cowell a lesson and show him that he’s powerful enough to get Jeff Buckley in the Christmas Top 5 without lifting a single finger.” “Oh and let’s show that The X Factor is manipulative and not about music by making people buy a song not because they like it but as a token of their dislike for something else.” LOGIC FAIL.

Evening Times: and this is *before* the layoffs

As mentioned previously, Glasgow’s Evening Times is laying off a whole bunch of people because, apparently, they’re no longer needed in today’s multi-platform media world. Looks like they’ve already sacked the subs.

Bye, Grandad

My paternal grandfather died in the early hours of Monday morning – a chest infection, although dementia and blindness took him away from us some time ago. I’d like to think that, had he been able to read it, he’d have enjoyed this column I wrote for .net a year or so ago.

Live Forever

I found it by accident during my annual clean-up: a battered and bent folder full of yellowed pages. On each page there’s a poem written by my grandfather. Poems about my father, written when he was still toddling; poems about my grandmother, written in the first flush of romance; and poems about my grandfather himself, when he was young and strong, fit and fiery. My grandfather – the man he was then, not as he is now – leaps from every word.

Today, my grandfather is in a nursing home. His sight has gone, and so has the fire. If you met him now, you’d find it hard to spot the keen intelligence – and sometimes, anger – that made him a fearsome and funny letter writer whose wisecracks appeared in all kinds of publications. If you caught him on a good day you might see a flash of amusement, but it’d be a pale echo of the wicked humour that so often put him in the doghouse – like the time he shaved off his eyebrows before an important interview for no other reason than to freak out the interviewer, or the time my grandmother found him drunk, trousers impaled on the railings of a fence, hanging upside down and crooning “Don’t Fence Me In” with a grin like a Cheshire cat. But it’s all there in the poems. In their pages, he’s forever young. And on the internet, so are we.

I’m 35 this year, but in a scanned photo I’m sixteen, photographed at a gig where I tried and failed to hide the stage fright and dressed like an explosion in a tramp factory. In an MP3 I’m 22, battering guitars in a studio with a bunch of friends, convinced not just that music could change the world but that we were the ones to do it. I’m 29, arm around a beautiful girl in Amsterdam, and I’m 31, shaking in my kilt as the same girl says “I do”, and I’m 34, jumping around like a maniac because the pregnancy test’s turned blue.

It’s not just photos. Everything that’s scared me, worried me, made me laugh or made me furious in the last several years is still there on my blog, and long-deleted HTML is still hanging around on the Wayback machine. Our Flickr photos, our MP3s, our blog posts and our online profiles are time capsules, a mood or a moment caught, captured and preserved – possibly forever.

And of course, the bad stuff is preserved as well as the good. But even the embarrassing stuff has its charms. Sure, I looked like an idiot, the song’s terrible, that shirt’s utterly repulsive and that pose is ridiculous, but hey! I had hair! And when it’s my turn for the home, when it’s my sight that’s gone, when it’s my fire that’s flickering out and there’s only a trace of who I used to be, on the internet I’m still sixteen, or nineteen, or thirty-four.

What’s wrong with this pornographic picture? (Don’t worry, there aren’t any images in this post)

When I was much, much younger, my fellow pupils were highly amused by a 200th generation photocopy of various crude drawings depicting Mickey Mouse having sex with Minnie Mouse. If they’d been caught, they’d have been in trouble. If they were pupils now and got caught, would they end up on the sex offenders’ register? If they lived in Australia, yes.

Cartoon characters are people too, a judge has ruled in the case of a man convicted over sexually explicit cartoons based on The Simpsons.

In the Australian New South Wales Supreme Court today, Justice Michael Adams ruled that a fictional cartoon character was a “person” within the meaning of the relevant state and commonwealth laws.

Alan John McEwan was appealing his February conviction for possessing child pornography and using his computer to access child pornography.

“The alleged pornography comprised a series of cartoons depicting figures modelled on members of the television animated series The Simpsons,” the judge said.

The cartoons showed characters such as Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson having sex.

McEwan was convicted and fined $3000 and placed on a good behaviour bond.

To be fair, the UK’s anti-porn legislation doesn’t cover cartoons – although as we discovered this week, it can certainly be interpreted as covering horrid album covers from shite rock bands. But clearly, in some parts of the world a cartoon is, legally speaking, identical to a photo of a real person.

How can I put this? I know.

Cartoons aren’t people.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some appalling cartoons out there, many of which depict acts that are beyond illegal and well into the territory of “I didn’t realise human beings could possibly imagine such things, let alone get off on them”. But…

Cartoons aren’t people.

And I do realise that in some cases, cartoonists and the people who view those cartoons are basically doing it to get around the law, and if they thought it was safe to do so they’d be producing and/or looking at photos, not cartoons. But -

Cartoons aren’t people.

This is important, I think, because possessing an image of Bart Simpson doing unspeakable things to Homer, or Marge or whatever isn’t the same thing as possessing an image of a real human being abused. There’s no chain of abuse here, no evil bastards forcing cartoon characters into abusive situations to satisfy the warped desires of the credit card-wielding internet public. Because – and I think you know what I’m going to say here – cartoons aren’t people. The whole rationale behind criminalising possession rather than production of certain kinds of pornography is to protect the people who appear in the photographs. In the case of cartoon porn, there are no people to protect.

Of course, you could also argue that acting isn’t reality, and that if certain kinds of pornography are fantasies acted out by professional actors, then there’s nobody to protect there either. But that’s a great big can of worms that I’d rather not open.

You could also argue that people who do view cartoons are more likely to view the real stuff, and that a proportion of those people will go on to enact their fantasies in real life. Which may well be true, but if your legal system is based on presumed innocence, you can’t convict somebody of a crime you think they *might* commit.

More importantly, all I know about this case is from a single-source article that’s been reproduced widely. It’s possible that the defendant had loads of illegal porn, of which the cartoon stuff was only a tiny proportion, and that the appeal was a rather desperate idea by his lawyer. But in the absence of any more information, and based on the judge’s comment that the pornography was “comprised of” Simpsons porn, it does seem to be the case that the judge has ruled that cartoons are people. Which, as I may have mentioned, they aren’t.

This is important because some elements of the community see things in shades of black and white. A sex offender is a sex offender, and angry mobs don’t bother to check whether the offence was dogging, having sex with a 15-year old girlfriend when you’re 16, or actively preying on children. Sometimes they don’t even bother to check whether people actually are sex offenders: I think I’ve written about this before, but a few years back a big employer in the next town to me sacked a bunch of blokes for accessing porn at work. The word got out, and windows were smashed, wives were spat on in the street… you know the drill. The thing is, the porn they had been looking at wasn’t illegal at all. They weren’t sacked because they’d been downloading horrific stuff; they were sacked because they were supposed to be working.

In that example, sections of the local community simply decided that they were dealing with a bunch of Gary Glitters. Do you really think if someone’s convicted of possessing obscene drawings – and ends up on the sex offenders register – that the local vigilantes will stop to ask – “hey! Was it real or was it merely a depiction of imagined acts on fictional characters?”

When we’re talking about indecent images, technology is creating ever more shades of grey. For example:

According to the results of a survey released today by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com, 22 percent of all teen girls — and 11 percent of teen girls ages 13-16 years old — say they have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude images of themselves.

And these racy images are also getting passed around: One-third (33 percent) of teen boys and one-quarter (25 percent) of teen girls say they have had nude/semi-nude images — originally meant to be private — shared with them.

Around the world, the law is pretty clear on this: possession of any of those images is possession of illegal porn. Do we really want 16, 17-year-old boys put on the sex offenders register for life because they’ve got cameraphone pics of their girlfriends’ tits? What about the people writing slash fiction about Harry Potter and his throbbing purple broomstick? Are they really a menace to society? Or even to wizards?

[12 Dec: reworded a few bits because they were a bit rambly]

WordPress 2.7: “Free software doesn’t get much better than this”

I’ve been playing with WordPress 2.7 for a wee while now, and my first impressions are up on Techradar:

Moving from 2.6 to 2.7 is no mere point upgrade: it’s more like moving from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. For beginners, it’s easier than before; for existing WordPress users it’s more flexible and considerably less annoying.

HMV: sales are up, but music’s dying

Mark Mulligan takes a look at HMV’s latest results:

music’s share of total sales is declining sharply and is strongly outweighed by DVD, which itself is now losing share to games and electronics.

… those responsible for in store CD sales are scared of accelerating cannibalization of their dwindling sales by driving people online. It’s too late for those kinds of concerns.

Who’s behind the ban on cigarette displays?

An interesting – and typically angry – post on Devil’s Kitchen by the Filthy Smoker takes a hard look at the new ban on cigarette displays.

The extraordinary support for the Department of Health (DOH)’s recommendations can only be explained by looking at the “stakeholders” who got involved. Of the 96,000 responses, only a handful came from private individuals. The rest came from block-voting by state-funded pressure groups and charities.

…Sure enough, SmokeFree NorthWest – with 49,507 votes – is entirely funded by the DoH. Direct Movement by the Youth Smokefree Team – with 10,757 votes – is entirely funded by SmokeFree Liverpool who are entirely funded by the DoH). SmokeFree NorthEast – with 8,128 votes – is entirely funded by…yes, the DoH.

…If you’re on the gravy train, you get a voice. If you’re not, forget it. Not so much a public consultation as a public sector consulation.

It’s particularly interesting to see the breakdown of ASH’s (Action on Smoking and Health) income in its 2007 accounts:

Department of Health: £210,400

Wales Assembly Government: £110,000

Supporting charities: £185,228

Donations & legacies received: £11,143

As the Filthy Smoker puts it:

Incidentally, take another look at that last figure. That is the full amount that was voluntarily given to this ‘charity’ in a whole year. To give you a frame of reference, the Cat’s Protection League received over £30 million in private donations in the same year. The fucking Donkey Sanctuary was given over £20 million.

ASH – one of the most powerful charities in the UK – made eleven grand. If they were left to fend for themselves they wouldn’t have the money to rent an office. They would be hard pushed to send out a solitary press release, let alone change the law of the fucking land every five minutes.

He also points out that the “supporting charities” whose donations are nearly 18 times higher than those from the public are Cancer Research and the British Heart Foundation. Isn’t it a bit off for charities to donate their donations to *other* charities, no matter how much they have in common?

What’s interesting about this isn’t whether or not people support cigarette displays; it’s the process that’s led to the ban. To paraphrase the description on Devil’s Kitchen:

* The DoH decides what it wants to do.

* The DoH runs a public consultation but doesn’t tell the public.

* The DoH does tell the DoH-funded pressure groups that support what it wants to do.

* The pressure groups respond in their thousands, supporting the DoH’s plans.

* The DoH gets the law it wants and can say with a straight face that the overwhelming majority of respondents support the law.

It’s like something Douglas Adams would have written, isn’t it?

If the filthy smoker is correct, and I have no reason to assume he isn’t, then something stinks much worse than cigarettes here.

Glasgow’s CCA is looking for fiction writers, artists and critics

I don’t know anything about this so I thought I’d post the email I’ve just received:

Here at CCA (Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow) we are launching a new quarterly publication named 2HB for which we are seeking contributions from writers and artists. The focus will be on short pieces of fiction and also creative critical pieces on the themes of eroticism, sci-fi, philosophical fiction, art as writing and detective fiction.

We are looking for brave writers who are able to step outside the ordinary and command their readers to take note of a new perspective of reality.

If you have any such contacts, please could you direct them to the 2HB page on our website
www.cca-glasgow.com
There they will find directions for submissions as well as details of deadlines and publication dates.