If you write – they will come

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I’m interested, peripherally, about how people find web pages and why they read them.  Especially with respect to personal blogs (such as mine) for people who are neither famous nor especially interesting.  The two things I can tell you are,

  1. If you write it, they will come.  People will read anything, and if you eventually get your blog to show up on searches, some people will turn up and read stuff.
  2. The more you write, the more chance you’ll get visitors and the corollary, if you stop writing, they will go.  It doesn’t matter what you write, almost, if you write every day you’ll get visitors on that basis.  If you write once a week you’ll get fewer, if you write once a month you’ll get fewer still.  If you write sporadically you’ll get sporadic visitors, if you write consistently you’ll get consistent visitors.

So there.

How do you make mystery TV mysterious?

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It can’t be easy making mysterious TV mysterious any more.  Sure, if it’s not popular you’ve got a chance, but as soon as it is popular you’re screwed.  In the old days, the folk in the house would talk about the plot and maybe they’d work out some of what was going on, but they wouldn’t know anything until the following week.  Perhaps someone in the house would work out Some Great Secret but you didn’t have any way of confirming it.

Maybe they chatted about it to a friend or two at work.  Perhaps students got together in bars and mused over cheap alcohol.  But eventually you had to watch and find out.  You had no contact with the writers.

Later, maybe magazines ran stories, and you could garner some information from those to share among your small circle of friends and you could enjoy yourselves discussing the possibilities.

These days, thousands of fans, maybe tens of thousands gather on forums and they pour over every aspect of the show.  The dialog, the scenes (frame by bloody frame if necessary), and they look for connections.  Connections within the show, within the other shows of the same writers and directors and producers.  They look for patterns and they talk and talk and discuss and theorise.

Writers are normal people.  They’re not super heroes with super writing powers.  They invent stuff and they research stuff and they bring to the front stuff they watched and remembered and enjoyed and twist the tale and deliver excitement.  But they’re normal folk.  So when you bring together 10,000 more normal folk they’re going to have some shared experience, some knowledge, some idea of what is going on, and when they brainstorm – well you should fear their collective awareness.

They will find every hole, they will spot every plot, they will dig deeper than you can imagine, they will invent stuff you love but never thought of yourself.

How on earth are writers ever going to deliver something interesting at the end of a mystery TV series these days?  Is there no hope?

Is Fringe doomed, lost in the shadow of the thousands of fans predicting every episode and digging beneath every mystery?  Did Lost lose it’s way when the fans described every possible explanation for the island there could be?  Do we need to use the approach from Push where our hero works out what to do and then has his mind wiped so no one, not even he, can guess where things will lead?

Will we end up with soap opera style TV series in which there is no long running mystery because how can any mystery survive the glare?  Will we have to live on a diet of 1 hour mysteries with no long running story line (and how long will they survive when we’re all wired in and talking to our 10,000 friends while the episode is on air).

I wonder how mystery TV writers with ambitions of long plot arcs will survive in the glare of the Internet and how fans will come to lament the loss of the mystery and the inevitable let down when the predictions from 10,000 fans come true in the final episodes.

Twitter / Facebook fail?

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Well that sucks.  I noticed a few days ago that the Facebook Twitter app had stopped updating my Facebook status, and started making wall posts.  Didn’t think much of it, just assumed I was missing a new option.  Then I noticed other people saying the same thing.

Did some digging and it looks like Twitter have made the change ‘at the request of the Facebook folk’.  Check out this (closed) bug report,

http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=1627

If I wanted the Twitter app to make wall posts, I’d have done that.  I wanted it to make status updates (so I could update several status entries from one place only).

Not enough people read this blog to start a movement, which is a shame, because I’d like this to go back to how it was.  I’d rather not use a third-party app because Twitter already has my credentials and I’m nervous about using them in other apps, or giving other apps access to anything more than I need to.  Some people suggest the Smart Twitter Facebook app is okay, and if nothing changes I may move to that eventually.

Shame.  And to use the phrase everyone loves, Twitter Fail (or rather #twitterfail)

An Open letter to my Labour candidate

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Dear Labour Candidate,

I didn’t vote for you in the 2010 General Election.  Previously I have always voted Labour.  I agree in principal with the philosophy of the Labour party and disagree fundamentally with the philosophy of the Conservatives.  However, over the last few years the Labour party has consistently brought in laws in specific areas which I can not support.  Those laws outweigh the good that the party can and has done.  I hate the idea of a Conservative government, but if I voted Labour it would have given you a mandate to continue eroding my rights and my privacy.  I can’t give you that mandate, you have to understand that the decisions your party has taken over the last few years in areas such as terrorism law, digital and copyright law, privacy and data retention laws are abhorrent to me.

This isn’t about the recession.  Nor is it about Brown.

The worst outcome for me would be a Conservative government and a Labour party who thinks the reason they lost was Brown.  It’s not Brown, it’s not the expenses scandal, it’s not finance.

It’s my personal freedom, my liberty, my privacy.  You have eroded my rights and I’m prepared to live with the Conservatives for four or five years to make you see that.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

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Every now and then I trawl through Amazon’s bargain bin for old films I fancy watching again or feel like owning.  Just been through today.  Almost bought the complete Terrahawks DVD box set but it’s not exactly bargain price, likewise for Star Fleet (Staaarrrrfleeeeeeet).  Did end up getting some other gems though, a few I want to be a surprise for Grete so I won’t mention those, but I felt it was about time we owned the first Police Academy, Airplane 1 & 2, the Naked Gun movies, Lost Boys, Little Shop of Horrors, Dark Crystal, and Reservoir Dogs.  Most of them are under £3!

We recently watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Wargames.  Both of them are as good as I remember.  Wargames stands the test of time remarkably well considering the subject matter.  I was amused by how the FBI dealt with our super-hacker, these days the movie would probably have him being caught, bagged and shipped abroad for ‘special treatment’ without so much as a second glance, but in the 80’s they just put you into a store room with a randy guard on the door and lots of sharp objects in the draws.  How times change.  If Wargames wasn’t the movie that taught you what the term DEFCON meant, then I’m not sure I want to be in your gang.

I think Wargames should be part of all Computer Studies courses at university.  Both to remind people what daisy wheel printers were along with acoustic modems, and also to remind them why closed loop computer systems are bad.  Oh, and to prove to them all that even the geeks can get the girl (or guy, if you’re a girl geek, but you know what I mean).

That reminds me, I should probably get a copy of Sneakers on DVD at some stage.

Was Wargames the first movie to give us the trope of text appearing on the terminal one character at a time and making a noise while it did it?  I wonder.

Anyway I leave you with this quote, one of my favourite movie quotes of all time,

Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

2012

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I’m not really a fan of disaster movies.  I would describe 2012 as traditional global-disaster movie fare.

  1. We have an estranged family (husband and wife divorced, two kids, new husband in the frame)
  2. We have a growing threat, and a plan
  3. We have a few other key story members with either existing relationships that will be stretched by the disaster or new relationships that will be formed as a result of it
  4. We then get 158 minutes of a single threaded plot, which brings these people together or forces them apart and provides heroes the chance to stand up and be counted while villains perish in fiery justice.

I spent most of the first hour doing something else as well.  Checking e-mails, browsing IMDB, playing Plants vs. Zombies.  It’s pretty predictable, as the estranged husband takes his kids on a camping trip and discovers a global conspiracy over some cataclysmic event.  However, eventually the acting and the action and the shear madness of the whole thing drags you in, and by about the one hour mark I was engaged.

The special effects are impressive, the destruction is amusing, the solution is far fetched and insane and the moments of heroic sacrifice are about as cliche as they get.  It’s not a good movie.  It’s too long for one, and it’s far too predictable for another, but it was eventually engaging.  The only two actors who seemed to have any meat on their roles were John Cusack and Chiwetel Ejiofor.  Cusack managed to bring some life to his character, Ejiofor did the best he could with some pretty slack writing.  No one else stood out, which isn’t to say they did badly, but just that the source material was so entirely bland.

Should you see 2012?  Maybe, if you fancy killing 158 minutes and can’t think of anything better to do, but don’t buy it, rent it for as little as possible.

Turn and face the strange

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There are a lot of things going on at the moment, a lot of potential and certain change.  For some people change is great, for some, and that includes me, change is unsettling at the least and very stressful at worst.

I’m on the verge of finally starting to learn to drive.  Maybe I’ll pass my test before I’m 40.  Just need to get a photo signed (got them taken today), get the ID back and actually arrange the lessons, but I’m in the right place mentally which I’ve not really been before.  Mostly it’s thanks to Grete for sorting out the hassle that I can never be bothered to deal with.  I’m actually, if I let myself think about it, looking forward to it, but let’s keep that a secret for now.

My employer is currently going through a round of redundancies.  I’m included in the ‘in scope’ pool.  So there’s a fair amount of uncertainty from that.  Won’t really know where I stand personally for another few weeks.

Add in to that mix that I’m changing roles at work as well.  It’s not been formally announced yet and so I’m not going to give any detail here, but I’m staying in the same bit of the company and hence still ‘in-scope’ (see above), but moving to a different role.  No definite timescales as of yet.  That’s the big change I tweeted about a short while back – once it’s been formally announced at work, I’ll provide an update.

And of top of all of that, and I’m not sure how many folk will understand / care, I’ve taken on the role of Control for the uk.* usenet hierarchy.  Voluntary position, and different people probably have different views about how much of a concern it should be, but for me it’s a big deal, and I intend to carry out the role as well as I can which brings it’s own level of change and stress.  I’m proud to have been offered the position.

A couple of other minor things, and there’s a big stirring pot of change going on right now.