Walking out of Watchmen

I went to see Watchmen last night, and walked out after an hour – which was gutting, because I was really looking forward to seeing it. But either my memory of the graphic novel is faulty or the film just didn’t work, because at no point after the clever opening credits was I even vaguely interested. Bored, annoyed, embarrassed that I’d persuaded Mrs Bigmouth to go, yes. Interested, no.

Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that I’ve been spoilt by films such as The Dark Knight. Watchmen’s “What if superheroes were real?” thing is no longer a novelty (I know it got there a long time ago, but it’s an old idea in movies now), but where Dark Knight made an effort to do something with the source material Watchmen felt like a shot by shot recreation of the comic. And for me, that didn’t work. Rorshasch’s voiceover sounded hackneyed and adolescent, which I don’t recall it being in the book (then again, I was a lot younger when I read it, so maybe it is). The dialogue was terrible. And as for the acting and direction: wooden and liking the violence a wee bit too much respectively. It felt like I was watching The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy having a wank.

Did you go to see Watchmen? What did you make of it?

.net column: could the war on terror mean the end of online anonymity?

Another of my print columns has made its way online: The war on terror will wipe out Web privacy.

Getting rid of online anonymity wouldn’t actually be that hard to do. Simply pass a law that requires everybody who goes online to get a unique identifier, and to use that identifier whenever they interact with the internet – when they email, or comment, or shop…

You’d need to provide your ID when you used your broadband connection, or set up a webmail account, or commented on a blog, or joined a public Wi-Fi hotspot, or used a cybercafe: no ID, no access.

Interesting things: an article about netbooks and an article about the Kindle

Wired Magazine has a fascinating piece about the rise of the netbook:

For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did.

And Richard Cobbett’s posted a great piece about the Kindle and ebooks in general:

I’m aware that there are some people who will happily read a novel on the iPhone. These people are crazy.

Fancy a year of .net magazine for free?

Between now and the 17th of March .net’s giving away free subscriptions via the mag’s Twitter account. More details here.

Techradar Thursday: 3G sucks, Google should buy things

More words on the Internet. First, six companies Google should buy including, yep, Twitter:

Google’s search spiders are amazing things, but they can’t do what Twitter Search does: let you see in real time what six million people are saying. Bringing Twitter into the fold could work in two ways: as a search tool in its own right, and as a way to refine web results based on ‘trending’ – that is, up and coming – topics people are chatting about. For Twitter users, Google could offer better reliability: while Google Mail has been up and down a bit over the last few months, you’re still much more likely to see the Twitter Fail Whale than have problems with a Google site.

Then, 3G sucks when you’re in the sticks.

On a good day, outside, you’ll see the little 3G icon. Go indoors, though, and it disappears. That’s on a good day. On a bad day, like yesterday, there’s no 3G signal at all. We couldn’t even use GSM. Phone calls? Yes. Data? Nope.

The further from the cities you go, the worse it gets. And Scotland, like Wales, Northern Ireland and the North of England, doesn’t have too many big cities. If you stick to the big motorways, the cities and the very biggest towns you’ll get decent coverage. Everywhere else – and in Scotland, most of the country is everywhere else – you won’t.

Arena closes, men’s magazines still suck

I wrote this four years ago:

Arena’s confused – it can’t make its mind up whether it’s going after GQ readers or Loaded readers, and falls flat between the two

Today’s Guardian reports that Arena is to cease publication after 22 years.

In the same post, I wrote this:

Perhaps the problem is that there’s no real need for a men’s magazine, because most other magazines are for men. Computer magazines are largely read by men. Car magazines are almost exclusively read by men. Music, film… men men men men men.

I think that’s still the case. Any sign of this?

A magazine that isn’t aimed at sniggering schoolboys, that doesn’t write ten-page features on the correct way to wear cufflinks, that doesn’t tell me that I need to spend 18 hours a day in the gym to get the perfect body, that doesn’t cover a single subject (cars, gadgets, books, music) and that doesn’t hate, fear or envy women. A magazine that doesn’t make me skip 90% of its pages. A magazine that I wouldn’t be embarrased to have in my house.

Belated Techradar Tuesday: seven reasons why Apple should make a netbook, and why laptops are just handbags

First up, a feature: seven reasons why Apple should make a netbook (and a few reasons why it shouldn’t). Here’s one of the reasons why it shouldn’t:

An HD Touch would be more compelling

Take one iPod Touch, make it twice the size, give it some desktop-style apps and you’ve got something that no other computer firm can deliver (or, we suspect, even imagine). You’d have all the things you expect from an iPhone, plus decent e-book reading and document editing. How great would that be? Bluetooth support for an external keyboard, 3G modem as an option, best computer ever.

Then, a column: if Confessions of a Shopaholic was about tech instead of handbags, we’d think it was great. Tech Firms! You’re doing it wrong!

…the tech industry is just like the fashion industry. It sells you stuff and tells you you’ll look like Audrey Hepburn or Brad Pitt; six weeks later it’s shouting “You look like your gran!” and telling you to buy something else or kill yourself. An overpowered laptop is no different to a £1,000 It Bag: it’s just more crap that helps fuel credit crunches and contributes to climate change. When we’re eating each other for food and having fist-fights with polar bears in the High Street, we’re going to regret it.

The column isn’t up yet. I’ll post the link when it is.

Update

Here’s the link: why netbooks prove that the tech industry’s gone nuts.

Amazon’s Kindle: publishers, what the hell are you doing?

There’s a superb article on Slate about the Kindle – and in particular, the dangers it poses to the book industry.

the Kindle locks you down with more rules than the Army Field Manual. The Kindle won’t let you resell or share your books. Anything you buy through the reader is fixed to your Amazon account, readable only on the Kindle or other devices that Amazon may one day deem appropriate. (The company has hinted that it’ll build an iPhone app that can read Kindle books.) Even worse, you can buy books for your Kindle only from Amazon’s store. Indeed, the device makes it difficult to read anything that’s not somehow routed through Amazon first—you can surf the Web on the Kindle, and you can convert some of your personal Microsoft Word or text files to the device’s format, but doing so is slow and not very reliable. In order to read blogs, magazines, newspapers, and books, you’ve really got to go through Amazon’s store first.

Publishing is already changing because of the rise of Amazon and supermarkets, both in books – the independent bookshop sector has been decimated – and in magazines, where increasingly you can’t sell enough copies to make your publication viable if the supermarkets don’t stock it (and you might have to change your covers, content or hand over some cash to persuade them to do that). But at least there’s still a little bit of competition in the real world. If Amazon dominates ebooks – and the linked article’s argument that that’s going to happen seems pretty persuasive to me – then online, you’ll either have to go through Amazon or fight for scraps.

This, inevitably, involves DRM. There are all kinds of open formats for documents, including ePub, but guess what? They don’t have DRM.

The best way to make e-books sharable and to untether them from proprietary devices like the Kindle would be to sell them without copy protection—but the book industry, like every other content business, is paranoid about piracy. Record labels fell into the same trap: They demanded that Apple impose copy restrictions that forced iPod owners to buy music through the iTunes store. But that ended up making Apple the nation’s largest music retailer, with the power to single-handedly determine the price of all recorded music.

There is a smart way and a stupid way for publishers to approach this. The stupid way seems to be happening already.

The smart way? Assuming that DRM is a deal breaker, which I assume it is, then print publishers of all kinds need to come together, agree on a standard, cross-platform, royalty-free format for ebook publishing, get all the hardware firms to support it, get shitloads of titles available as soon as you possibly can and – this bit is key – only deliver books in your format. Amazon wants its own format? Tough shit. Good luck selling nothing but vanity publishing!

I appreciate that getting a consensus will be as easy as catching air in a net, and of course any copy protection will be cracked. But book piracy already exists. Scanned books have been online since scanners were invented. The trick isn’t to get rid of piracy. It’s to create a market so easy and so compelling that people won’t think of pirating because they can get what they want on the hardware they want for a price they won’t mind paying.

You know, like the music industry should have done a decade ago – and like Amazon is trying to do right now.