Madhouse Beyond

This week's Doctor Who was very good. Not excellent, but very good. The consensus on the net seems to be completely polarised - just like Neil Cross's last episode, two weeks ago. Some think it's fantastic, some think it's awful.

Personally, as a fan of both horror and sci-fi, I really enjoyed it. I wrote a big rant about Moffat's episode "A Time of Angels" from a while back, and in that I suggested that the horror had eclipsed the sci-fi, but in this case it was spot on and, dare I say it, very much like the Tom Baker/Douglas Adams days of old in which a supernatural occurance becomes a whodunnit with a satisfying sci-fi conclusion. The bit I didn't get was the resolution for the alien.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the alien. It was great that such a curve ball was thrown - the 'ghost' they were searching for turned out to be two entities completely - but the fact that they had to explain the alien's presence was a bit gratuitous. I felt the episode could have been far better if they'd just removed the last three minutes or so, it wouldn't really have affected the tone or moral of the episode. Maybe it was the scene where the Doctor finally comes face to face with the alien that ruined it for me. The director Jamie Payne did such a good job of ensuring you never actually see what's chasing them, genuinely scary stuff, and then went and ruined it with a man in a rubber suit.

I recall a deleted scene from Ridley Scott's masterpiece of sci-fi horror, Alien. In the scene, a seemingly harmless lump in the corner of the room turns out to be the predatorial creature all along, a trick Moffat himself uses so regularly, but Scott decided to remove the scene because you actually see the alien moving and on-screen for more than a split-second, making it look like a man in a suit. It's a shame Payne didn't do the same. It's almost like someone at the BBC said "oh, we need to have a bit about how ugly inhuman alien creatures aren't all bad" and the writer simply tagged an extra scene on.

Despite my gripe, the episode was very good. Not the best episode this half-series so far - Gatiss's "Cold War" still holds that accolade in my opinion (and not just because Jenna-Louise Coleman spent the entire episode in a party dress and heels for no good reason, something that should happen far more often, dammit!) But yes, let's give Neil Cross a few more episodes next series, he can clearly write well. This week's episode was definately classic Who. But that doesn't necessarily make it automatically perfect (let's not forget that The Happiness Patrol is generally considered 'classic' Who!)

I hope that review's muddied the internet waters a bit.

Tags: doctor who, opinion

Posted by Ash | Permalink

Facebook Home

Fri 12th Apr 2013

Facebook have announced Facebook Home, a UI for the Android operating system. Normally when Facebook announce a new feature, I write a ranty blog post telling everyone why they shouldn't use it (which people usually ignore, at least until the BBC publishes an almost identical article a year later.)

So this time I'm not going to say anything technical at all. My views on the subject are irelevant - I won't be using Facebook Home, and most of my less tech-savvy friends are iPhone users so they can't even if they want to.

What is starting to bug me are Facebook's tech demos. Specifically, the sample data they're using. It's far more interesting than any of my actual friends. For example, check out www.facebook.com/home. It shows off some of the new (er - repackaged) features that you can use with Facebook Home. You can get status updates right on your home screen. Elisabeth Carr wants to tell you "Just finished my first marathon and qualified for Boston!" Nicholas Arioli asks "Finally paid off my student loan, who wants to help me celebrate?". The reality is, of course, that most people (at least most people I know) don't post status updates nearly as interesting - it's usually something along the lines of "OMG, my parcel is late, I took the day off for nothing", "My ex-husband is such a dick" or "Just saw a squirrel piss on a cat LOL."

The sample photos on the demo are fantastic too - Facebook Home allows you to see all your friends' photos on your home screen as they're shared. Look at Amanda Johnston's beautiful photo of Lake Tahoe. Look at Will Bailey's fabulously arty photo of his lone tent in a corn field. The reality is, of course, that the photos will probably be of your mate Dave passed out on the floor of a toilet cubicle. Or your old high-school friend Lauren (who you never really spoke to anyway) and her 50th photo of her kid today. Perhaps an over-saturated photo of some sushi, or, if you're really lucky, a photo of the aforementioned squirrel pissing on a cat.

The simple fact is that most people are fucking boring. It's not their fault, each to their own. But continual connection to everyone else is a bad thing, not a good thing. If my friends did continually post photos of their skydiving trips, or their camping expeditions in beautiful places, or wrote about interesting things, then I'd have much more time for Facebook and social networking in general. I can only imagine that the sample data is based on Mark Zuckerberg's naive assumption of what having any friends is actually like. Maybe there's a niche market here - I should start a service that actually fills your Facebook feed with interesting (if completely fictional) things, so you can pretend your friends' mundane life experiences are actually worth reading about.

I'm going to stop ranting now, if you'd like more information about Facebook, please consult the great Oatmeal.

Tags: facebook, life

Posted by Ash | Permalink

Minami Con 19

Sun 3rd Mar 2013

1st-3rd March 2013, The Novotel, Southampton.