Right off the bat, let me own up to writing a sensationalised headline for the sake of making it sound snappy. What I'm actually going to be writing (ranting) about today is UltraViolet. Not the atrocious Milla Jovovitch movie of 2006, or the comic books on which it was based, but the cloud-based licensing system that all the cool kids (movie studios) seem to be using these days to allow disc-free access to their content, be it in the form of downloads or online streaming. In theory it sounds like a great idea, and something I'd like to see more of - making content more easily available and playable on a range of devices, allowing consumers to enjoy the content they've bought (or bought access to, if we're being pedantic) as and when they wish.
In practice, however, I've spent the last hour setting up three separate accounts (UltraViolet, Sony Pictures and Flixster), installing three separate applications on my computer (the Sony Pictures download manager and two versions of Microsoft Silverlight, because the first one Sony linked me to was out of date), and for the last 45 minutes I've had a download of The Amazing Spiderman running which as I type is not even halfway complete. Currently the Sony Pictures account is refusing to accept the password I just set it up with, and the "forgot password" link isn't working either. The site advises me to contact customer support, but they've all gone home for the day.
Okay, so this is really more of a rant about Sony than about UltraViolet, but it's still a hell of a hassle when you consider I could just torrent copies of the movies (which, I remind you, I have already paid for), and they would download faster and play on a wider range of devices. Oh, and I could back them up as many times as I liked without encountering DRM problems. This is the problem with the current legal offerings in the download market - they still expect their audience to pay exorbitant prices for content while forcing us to install all kinds of crap and endure all kinds of hassle if we wish to access it in anything other than a 20th-century fashion (i.e. by putting a disc in a player and watching the film the old-fashioned way). The film industry is a collection of businesses whose business model has evolved very little in the last 50 years and is still incredibly resistant to change. In an era when technology is evolving faster than ever, is it any wonder these companies are losing so much money (still nowhere near what they claim, but undoubtedly some) to piracy? No, it really isn't.
So, to the film studios I make this plea. For heaven's sake make downloading as easy, quick and hassle-free as the illegal alternatives. I don't mind having to pay for the films I watch - I realise they cost a lot of money to make and that that money has to come from somewhere, and I really don't mind being the source of some of that funding if the payoff is I get to keep watching great movies. What I'm not cool with though is paying to be inconvenienced by your ridiculously backward systems. I know all this bullshit exists for the purpose of making piracy as unattractive as possible, but you're accomplishing the exact reverse.
YAAAARRRRR!
Saturday 14 September 2013
Tuesday 10 September 2013
They don't make 'em like they used to...
Another short post tonight as it's been a very long day!
I've recently rediscovered the cartoon series Animaniacs. I was a massive fan of this show as a kid, so I was very excited to discover that like all good (and otherwise) things, there are a bunch of videos of it on Youtube. After watching a few of these as an adult though, I can't help but feel there was more going on in these cartoons than I realised as a child. Here's a video with a few examples of what I mean:
Yeah. Somehow I get the feeling that jokes like these wouldn't make it past the censors these days, and if they did the production company would immediately be lynched by the combined forces of Mumsnet and the Daily Mail. To be honest, I'm amazed some of these ("Finger Prince") were ever broadcast at all. And yet, for all the shock factor we feel at the idea of children being exposed to this kind of filth (helpfully highlighted by Yakko's cheerful "Goodnight everybody!" so you know you've missed something), I would submit that it hasn't done me any harm, and that I was able to continue my childhood blissfully unaware that I'd even seen anything wrong. What's more, I now get to re-watch some very well-written cartoons (also something of a rare breed these days) in the knowledge that I'm getting more out of them as an adult than I ever did as a child. The modern obsession with sanitising the lives of our children will deprive the next generation of the fun I've been experiencing over the last few days, and I think that's a real shame.
I've recently rediscovered the cartoon series Animaniacs. I was a massive fan of this show as a kid, so I was very excited to discover that like all good (and otherwise) things, there are a bunch of videos of it on Youtube. After watching a few of these as an adult though, I can't help but feel there was more going on in these cartoons than I realised as a child. Here's a video with a few examples of what I mean:
Yeah. Somehow I get the feeling that jokes like these wouldn't make it past the censors these days, and if they did the production company would immediately be lynched by the combined forces of Mumsnet and the Daily Mail. To be honest, I'm amazed some of these ("Finger Prince") were ever broadcast at all. And yet, for all the shock factor we feel at the idea of children being exposed to this kind of filth (helpfully highlighted by Yakko's cheerful "Goodnight everybody!" so you know you've missed something), I would submit that it hasn't done me any harm, and that I was able to continue my childhood blissfully unaware that I'd even seen anything wrong. What's more, I now get to re-watch some very well-written cartoons (also something of a rare breed these days) in the knowledge that I'm getting more out of them as an adult than I ever did as a child. The modern obsession with sanitising the lives of our children will deprive the next generation of the fun I've been experiencing over the last few days, and I think that's a real shame.
Monday 9 September 2013
Nothing to say, so here's some awesomeness
I had something awesome and relevant to write about, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. So in lieu of anything better to say today, I'm going to share a couple of things with you. Firstly, this song, which has been stuck in my head ever since I first heard it:
Secondly, this site, which was shared by a friend on Facebook and amused me greatly. If links aren't your thing, the site poses the simple question, "What if Pacific Rim was based in the UK?" and is basically an excuse for using Warner Bros' build-a-Jaeger web game (not suitable for slower connections/computers) to come up with some very British giant asskicking robots. Naturally I've made my own, and here it is:
Yeah. Now go check out the site, which is much funnier.
...And now I've remembered what I meant to write about originally. Something about payday loans. I think I'll save that one for when I'm feeling more awake. 'Til next time then!
Secondly, this site, which was shared by a friend on Facebook and amused me greatly. If links aren't your thing, the site poses the simple question, "What if Pacific Rim was based in the UK?" and is basically an excuse for using Warner Bros' build-a-Jaeger web game (not suitable for slower connections/computers) to come up with some very British giant asskicking robots. Naturally I've made my own, and here it is:
Yeah. Now go check out the site, which is much funnier.
...And now I've remembered what I meant to write about originally. Something about payday loans. I think I'll save that one for when I'm feeling more awake. 'Til next time then!
Friday 10 May 2013
Facebook's censorship hypocrisy
Facebook's censorship policies have been in the news again recently. This latest row is the result of several videos of people being decapitated. These are (somehow) not in violation of Facebook's community standards, and the site resisted initial pressure to have them removed, only caving when the media started reporting on the story. Their initial reasoning for leaving the video online was that it was being shared in the spirit of condemnation of the actions depicted in the video, and that Facebook respects "people's rights to describe, depict and comment on the world in which we live". While this statement makes a great soundbite for the site, it is clearly shown to be false when considering how the site enforces its existing censorship policies.
My main beef here is that there seems to be a world of difference in the strictness of the policy when applied to different types of content. Let's look at those community standards again. The guide on hate speech acknowledges a distinction between serious and humorous speech, allowing purveyors of "bad taste" jokes a platform while (theoretically) filtering out the worst excesses of hate groups. In practice however, the distinction between serious and humorous speech is not so easily made, especially over the Internet where a person's intended meaning can easily be misinterpreted by others. In this instance Facebook seems to err on the side of leniency when filtering content, and rightly so - while jokes about dead babies may be grossly offensive to many people, this alone is not reason enough to instigate a policy of censorship. Facebook's policy on phishing and spam is taken equally lightly - to be honest, I was surprised to find this included in their community standards at all. While I find unsolicited spam annoying, I can understand why it's there - Facebook is a business, and the first priority of any business is to make a profit, so fair play.
One of their community standards which is taken seriously is "nudity and pornography". The rule here seems to be no nipples (if female), and nothing in the crotch area, though pretty much anything else goes. (It's worth noting that Facebook makes a specific exemption for breastfeeding photos.) This is probably what gets me the most about the lopsidedness of their censorship policy. The argument most often brought up in the interests of censorship (apart from the "offense" point, which I don't respect enough to consider an argument) is that Facebook's minimum age limit is 13, meaning potentially anyone of this age with a Facebook account can access anything posted on Facebook. What I don't understand here is how nipples are more damaging to a child's development than videos of decapitation or extreme violence; though the decapitation videos have been removed, there's plenty of other violent content on the site (don't worry, that link doesn't point to them). To understand my problem here, take a look at these pictures:
The one on the left is copied directly from Facebook, and is a fairly vanilla example. The one on the right I had to source from Google images and is apparently too extreme for Facebook. That particular photo is taken from a French news site and is hardly pornographic in nature (unless you're really missing the point). Now consider our hypothetical 13-year-old again. A lot of children would be upset by the image of a dead animal - could the same really be said of boobs? Most of us are, after all, exposed to boobs from an early age. That's not to say that Facebook should start allowing hardcore pornography on its site, especially in the absence of any kind of age-verification wall, but to ban images such as the above on the same grounds is just silly.
I think the root cause here is what is considered appropriate varies from country to country, and Facebook is very much an American creation. America has always been somewhat lenient concerning depictions of violence in the media, but much less so when it comes to anything sexual. I have no idea why, perhaps something to do with the country's Christian roots, but that's the way it's always been. However, a (supposedly) international and modern institution like Facebook can and should be more mature about these things. Did I mention Femen have a Facebook group? They have to censor all their own photos to stop Facebook taking them down.
My point here is that Facebook needs to have a serious rethink about their censorship policy, and what they consider to be okay for their website. Certainly, when images such as that Femen protest photo need to be censored they can't claim to respect depictions of "the world in which we live" without reeking of rank hypocrisy. Jeremie Zimmerman makes an excellent point in the article I referenced earlier - "Since Facebook collects and stores so much information it should be able to determine when one of its members is a minor and is about to be exposed to content that has been reported as unsuitable, and display a warning message". I would go one step further - if a user is a minor in their country (let's not forget that different countries have different definitions of this), they should be barred from seeing certain content. This reduces the amount of censorship needed on the site while protecting children from age-inappropriate content. While debate may rage on exactly what this entails, a simple "mature content" flag on photos or videos such as the ones discussed in this blog would suffice to quell the criticism of Facebook almost entirely. Moreover, the more content Facebook hosts, the more options they have for making money from it. One can only wonder why they haven't implemented a system like this already.
My main beef here is that there seems to be a world of difference in the strictness of the policy when applied to different types of content. Let's look at those community standards again. The guide on hate speech acknowledges a distinction between serious and humorous speech, allowing purveyors of "bad taste" jokes a platform while (theoretically) filtering out the worst excesses of hate groups. In practice however, the distinction between serious and humorous speech is not so easily made, especially over the Internet where a person's intended meaning can easily be misinterpreted by others. In this instance Facebook seems to err on the side of leniency when filtering content, and rightly so - while jokes about dead babies may be grossly offensive to many people, this alone is not reason enough to instigate a policy of censorship. Facebook's policy on phishing and spam is taken equally lightly - to be honest, I was surprised to find this included in their community standards at all. While I find unsolicited spam annoying, I can understand why it's there - Facebook is a business, and the first priority of any business is to make a profit, so fair play.
One of their community standards which is taken seriously is "nudity and pornography". The rule here seems to be no nipples (if female), and nothing in the crotch area, though pretty much anything else goes. (It's worth noting that Facebook makes a specific exemption for breastfeeding photos.) This is probably what gets me the most about the lopsidedness of their censorship policy. The argument most often brought up in the interests of censorship (apart from the "offense" point, which I don't respect enough to consider an argument) is that Facebook's minimum age limit is 13, meaning potentially anyone of this age with a Facebook account can access anything posted on Facebook. What I don't understand here is how nipples are more damaging to a child's development than videos of decapitation or extreme violence; though the decapitation videos have been removed, there's plenty of other violent content on the site (don't worry, that link doesn't point to them). To understand my problem here, take a look at these pictures:
 |
| It took a surprisingly long time to find a photo of Femen that didn't include swearing. |
The one on the left is copied directly from Facebook, and is a fairly vanilla example. The one on the right I had to source from Google images and is apparently too extreme for Facebook. That particular photo is taken from a French news site and is hardly pornographic in nature (unless you're really missing the point). Now consider our hypothetical 13-year-old again. A lot of children would be upset by the image of a dead animal - could the same really be said of boobs? Most of us are, after all, exposed to boobs from an early age. That's not to say that Facebook should start allowing hardcore pornography on its site, especially in the absence of any kind of age-verification wall, but to ban images such as the above on the same grounds is just silly.
I think the root cause here is what is considered appropriate varies from country to country, and Facebook is very much an American creation. America has always been somewhat lenient concerning depictions of violence in the media, but much less so when it comes to anything sexual. I have no idea why, perhaps something to do with the country's Christian roots, but that's the way it's always been. However, a (supposedly) international and modern institution like Facebook can and should be more mature about these things. Did I mention Femen have a Facebook group? They have to censor all their own photos to stop Facebook taking them down.
My point here is that Facebook needs to have a serious rethink about their censorship policy, and what they consider to be okay for their website. Certainly, when images such as that Femen protest photo need to be censored they can't claim to respect depictions of "the world in which we live" without reeking of rank hypocrisy. Jeremie Zimmerman makes an excellent point in the article I referenced earlier - "Since Facebook collects and stores so much information it should be able to determine when one of its members is a minor and is about to be exposed to content that has been reported as unsuitable, and display a warning message". I would go one step further - if a user is a minor in their country (let's not forget that different countries have different definitions of this), they should be barred from seeing certain content. This reduces the amount of censorship needed on the site while protecting children from age-inappropriate content. While debate may rage on exactly what this entails, a simple "mature content" flag on photos or videos such as the ones discussed in this blog would suffice to quell the criticism of Facebook almost entirely. Moreover, the more content Facebook hosts, the more options they have for making money from it. One can only wonder why they haven't implemented a system like this already.
Thursday 25 April 2013
Iron Man 3, and what I thought of it.
I'm going to spell this out just in case the title didn't give it away, but THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT IRON MAN 3!
Obligatory warning out of the way, what did I think of the film? Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I'll get on to why in a minute, but I'll start with a roundup of the things I liked about it. In no particular order:
Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin
Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian, the Mandarin's corporate backer
Robert Downey Jr as himself
Gwyneth Paltrow kicking ass!
Some badass action sequences
Tony Stark dealing with anxiety attacks in the wake of the events of the Avengers
ALL OF THE ARMOUR!
There were a few things that really got to me about the film though, and not just the fact that AC/DC weren't heard for the duration (I mean, even Avengers used them to play in Iron Man). I'm going to start with Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin, and this is where the first MAJOR SPOILER comes in. If you haven't got the hint by now, you're never going to, so here goes.
I went to the film expecting to see the Mandarin as someone who could face off against Iron Man, or at least outwit him, but the big reveal of the film was that Ben Kingsley's character was just some drunk actor hired by Guy Pearce to play "The Mandarin" in order to cover up some malfunctioning Extremis tech and instigate a war on terror for profit. Words cannot express how gutted I was by this, but I'm going to try. I grew up watching the Iron Man cartoons on TV. This was my first experience of the character (I never really read comics as a kid), and his main nemesis in the cartoons was The Mandarin, a supervillain possessed of ten magical rings that together gave him the power to do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted. He was a total badass, but usually tended to use his intellect against Iron Man rather than tackling him head on. It made the show great to watch. So, when I heard they were bringing in the Mandarin as the villain for Iron Man 3 I got very excited. I never expected them to go down the full-on magic rings route, but I did think the Mandarin would be the central villain of the film, and I did expect him to be more than a match for Stark. For this reason, the big reveal of the film, where the Mandarin enters in his underwear to the sound of a toilet flushing and proceeds to be cowed into submission by Stark brandishing a gun, was almost painful to watch. I was expecting almost the whole way through the film for the Mandarin to reveal he'd just been playing Stark by putting on a fake British accent, and that he'd been two steps ahead of our hero all along. That's the Mandarin I remember - a genuinely threatening character, not some washed-up actor. The other reason this really disappoints me is that this means we will most likely never see the Mandarin in the Marvel movie universe.
Another big source of disappointment for me was the way the film ended. Stark blows up all his suits, gets the girl, fixes everything (including the shrapnel in his heart) and delivers a cosy little monologue about how his life is all better now and how he's a changed man. The tone is very much that he's hanging up his armour for good. If Iron Man was a separate franchise from the rest of the Marvel movieverse that's probably how they would have left the ending, and the film would have been better for it, but then they had to throw in the final line, "I am Iron Man". It just didn't fit with the rest of Stark's closing speech, and felt very much like it had been tacked on the end to leave the way open for Avengers 2. While I love watching the Marvel films, I think they were trying too hard to mimic the superhero trilogy masterclass illustrated by Christopher Nolan's Batman films, forgetting that at the end of that trilogy the hero bows out gracefully. While in real life, anyone in that position would doubtless pack it in after all that he's been through, Iron Man was never meant to have the gritty realism of the Dark Knight films - Tony Stark is too much larger-than-life, especially when Downey Jr's playing him.
And then there was the therapy - the post-credits sequence that revealed that Stark's narration of the film was actually him offloading to his lab buddy Bruce Banner, showing that the entire film was just an extended flashback. While I can understand that even Stark might have decided to get a little therapy after his anxiety attacks, a better way to show this would have been to show him talking to a character we haven't seen before. Especially in a post-credits sequence, they should be starting to drop hints about the next Avengers movie. Even if they decide not to go through with whatever they allude to, a subtle character placement would have kept the fans talking for months. Instead all we have is that Banner's going a bit grey and seems to have put on weight. The sequence was a huge missed opportunity.
Overall, I felt the film spent too much time looking back (as trilogy final-parters are prone to do) and too little time looking forward (as intermediate installments in film series are supposed to do). The music was just slightly wrong (because there was no AC/DC), Stark's suit never worked properly and I'm going to be pissed at Marvel for some time over what they did to the Mandarin.
I know a few people so far who've seen the film and loved it. I get why - there were a lot of good things about it - but for my money it could have been so much better.
Obligatory warning out of the way, what did I think of the film? Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I'll get on to why in a minute, but I'll start with a roundup of the things I liked about it. In no particular order:
Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin
Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian, the Mandarin's corporate backer
Robert Downey Jr as himself
Gwyneth Paltrow kicking ass!
Some badass action sequences
Tony Stark dealing with anxiety attacks in the wake of the events of the Avengers
ALL OF THE ARMOUR!
There were a few things that really got to me about the film though, and not just the fact that AC/DC weren't heard for the duration (I mean, even Avengers used them to play in Iron Man). I'm going to start with Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin, and this is where the first MAJOR SPOILER comes in. If you haven't got the hint by now, you're never going to, so here goes.
I went to the film expecting to see the Mandarin as someone who could face off against Iron Man, or at least outwit him, but the big reveal of the film was that Ben Kingsley's character was just some drunk actor hired by Guy Pearce to play "The Mandarin" in order to cover up some malfunctioning Extremis tech and instigate a war on terror for profit. Words cannot express how gutted I was by this, but I'm going to try. I grew up watching the Iron Man cartoons on TV. This was my first experience of the character (I never really read comics as a kid), and his main nemesis in the cartoons was The Mandarin, a supervillain possessed of ten magical rings that together gave him the power to do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted. He was a total badass, but usually tended to use his intellect against Iron Man rather than tackling him head on. It made the show great to watch. So, when I heard they were bringing in the Mandarin as the villain for Iron Man 3 I got very excited. I never expected them to go down the full-on magic rings route, but I did think the Mandarin would be the central villain of the film, and I did expect him to be more than a match for Stark. For this reason, the big reveal of the film, where the Mandarin enters in his underwear to the sound of a toilet flushing and proceeds to be cowed into submission by Stark brandishing a gun, was almost painful to watch. I was expecting almost the whole way through the film for the Mandarin to reveal he'd just been playing Stark by putting on a fake British accent, and that he'd been two steps ahead of our hero all along. That's the Mandarin I remember - a genuinely threatening character, not some washed-up actor. The other reason this really disappoints me is that this means we will most likely never see the Mandarin in the Marvel movie universe.
Another big source of disappointment for me was the way the film ended. Stark blows up all his suits, gets the girl, fixes everything (including the shrapnel in his heart) and delivers a cosy little monologue about how his life is all better now and how he's a changed man. The tone is very much that he's hanging up his armour for good. If Iron Man was a separate franchise from the rest of the Marvel movieverse that's probably how they would have left the ending, and the film would have been better for it, but then they had to throw in the final line, "I am Iron Man". It just didn't fit with the rest of Stark's closing speech, and felt very much like it had been tacked on the end to leave the way open for Avengers 2. While I love watching the Marvel films, I think they were trying too hard to mimic the superhero trilogy masterclass illustrated by Christopher Nolan's Batman films, forgetting that at the end of that trilogy the hero bows out gracefully. While in real life, anyone in that position would doubtless pack it in after all that he's been through, Iron Man was never meant to have the gritty realism of the Dark Knight films - Tony Stark is too much larger-than-life, especially when Downey Jr's playing him.
And then there was the therapy - the post-credits sequence that revealed that Stark's narration of the film was actually him offloading to his lab buddy Bruce Banner, showing that the entire film was just an extended flashback. While I can understand that even Stark might have decided to get a little therapy after his anxiety attacks, a better way to show this would have been to show him talking to a character we haven't seen before. Especially in a post-credits sequence, they should be starting to drop hints about the next Avengers movie. Even if they decide not to go through with whatever they allude to, a subtle character placement would have kept the fans talking for months. Instead all we have is that Banner's going a bit grey and seems to have put on weight. The sequence was a huge missed opportunity.
Overall, I felt the film spent too much time looking back (as trilogy final-parters are prone to do) and too little time looking forward (as intermediate installments in film series are supposed to do). The music was just slightly wrong (because there was no AC/DC), Stark's suit never worked properly and I'm going to be pissed at Marvel for some time over what they did to the Mandarin.
I know a few people so far who've seen the film and loved it. I get why - there were a lot of good things about it - but for my money it could have been so much better.
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