Right Brain Rumblings...

Moviemaking Updates and Other Miscellany

2011-07-03T11:04:00.000Z

I claim to be an amateur movie-maker at the top of the blog, but hardly ever seem to post anything about that very subject. Well the truth is that for the last while, I haven't been entirely focused on the movie making part of it. My last big effort in that direction was completion of the fine tuning for The Stone Unturned edit, the entire project of which has been rumbling on for a couple of years now. The edit is now, as they say, locked. All that remains is for the sound mix to be completed, at which point I should theoretically be able to drop it straight into Premiere, render it out and we have a complete movie! Theory is all very well in theory. Dropping the sound mix straight in should perhaps be more of a hypothesis than a theory, until tested against the evidence of having something that works.

Rendering for this half-hour production used to take my machine twenty minutes, until I figured that it could use some fancy colour-grading to give it more of the cinematic feel which all amateurs working in video seem to crave. Movie-looks were provided by a plugin called - unsurprisingly - Movielooks, a freebie obtained when I bought Premiere in the first place. Rendering it out no longer takes twenty minutes: it takes thirty hours. Looks great though. I'm especially pleased, since the free version is no longer available as a promotional item. And the reason I'm pleased is because I was able to find it cowering in a corner of one of my old hard drives. And that reason that pleased me is from having to partially rebuild the computer a few months back, when everything started to fail spectacularly. (An obscure interaction between the ATI graphics card and the rest of the system caused drive cacheing to fail. Not sure I believed the explanation, but only became convinced when the card’s fan physically spun itself right off the board.) I thought I'd lost the plugin entirely and the full - and only version - now available is a tad outside the range of my budget.

The Stone Unturned is tentatively scheduled for free release sometime before mumble mumble mumble. Potentially before the end of the year, but as we’ve learned these things never go to plan. In any case, I reckon it is the best-looking episode of Intrepid we’ve made so far. (Up to speed section: The Stone Unturned is a Star Trek fan film, the latest in the series. We're approaching it all quite allegedly professionally you know.)

Mainly, however, I’ve been preoccupied with writing or at least attempting to be preoccupied with it. To this end I've now got a complete short script, around 23 pages, which I've passed both to Nick and T'Other'Alf. Nick likes it well enough to film as-is and Lesley has assured me that "it's not complete pants". Which is encouraging! Executable, as it's now titled, has had an odd history. When I was writing Bit Patterns as a full-length Intrepid script, I was halfway through when Brian Matthews' script for The Stone Unturned made an appearance. At the time I didn't think I could complete mine quickly enough to start filming in the following months, and so it got bumped to next in line. Nick was working on a feature length Intrepid script called Conviction of Demons, of which some scenes have since been shot. I was concerned about what would amount to trying to make two feature films simultaneously, both of which would require extensive outdoor shooting. In typical Intrepid fashion, both were written in the large. A huge effort, then. Multiplied by two.

This was the point at which I started thinking about a full length original film which would be simpler to make. Something in a single location and with as few characters as possible. So I started jotting down notes and thinking about a project which had the working title Bottleneck, potentially our first original film. Then something odd happened. As I've written in another post, myself and Nick had a conversation, the outcome of which was to rejig Bit Patterns as an original film. Nice idea, but it involved way more than merely changing names. As it happened, it needed almost as much effort as writing it in the first place. Now that it's in the only-tweaking-required stage of scripting, it's obvious that it would need a serious budget and huge effort. We reckon we could start on a sizzle reel this year - well, next year - but so far it's just in the speculation stage.
(Of course this means that I still owe Nick an Intepid script...)

So now I wanted to think once again about something which could be achieved with less effort, and with the bonus of being less likely to drive me crazy. So I turned to the idea for Bottleneck and wondered how it would work not as a full-length script, but as a short one. And that was the genesis of what is now Executable, the final words of which I wrote just recently. Since it effectively takes place in a single location, is indoors and requires only three actors, we think it could be filmed in a weekend! Even better, from my perspective, it gives me a chance to make use of the DSLR for shooting, which I bought for the very good business reason that I really, really wanted one. DSLRs aren't known for their audio quality, however, but since Nick has just ordered a digital audio recorder...

And that’s where I am at the moment. No doubt everything which happens from now on is subject to change.

Computer Active Quotes Me on Lemmings

2011-03-19T17:43:00.003Z

Computer Active has a very nice blog post about the 20th Anniversary of Lemmings; very nice because they've quoted me and asked nicely about using one of my photos! This is probably as good a moment as any to show off my belated joining of Flickr, to which I've added a selection of pics from the celebration. Here's the selection I've uploaded.

The (temporary) plaque at DMA's "old old office". I'm told that there are plans afoot for something a little more permanent. I've also taken the opportunity to add this location - and DMA's other office - to Ben Goldacre's Nerd Map in case anyone wishes to make a retro computer game pilgrimage.

Lemmings is 20

2011-02-14T13:40:00.002Z

This Valentines day, I’ll do doing something a little different from the usual. Twenty whole years ago today was the release day for Lemmings, developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis. At the time I was in college, doing little freelance jobs for Dave Jones. Converting graphics for our ports of Ballistix and Shadow of the Beast occupied my spare time in the days before I was employed by DMA full-time. My job was to take shiny 32-colour graphics from the Amiga and hack them down into 4-colour character set displayable by the Commodore 64. Wednesday afternoons were free time as far as college was concerned, and that was when I’d tend to visit the office, bringing along the my latest efforts. It was during one of those days that I saw Mike’s famous Lemmings animation for the first time.

At one point in the late 90s, I came up with a small demo chapter to show what a History of DMA book might look like (a project which seems more relevant as time progresses; I never would have imagined I’d be getting interviewed by BBC Radio Scotland on this very subject two decades later.) Here’s a remastered version, without all the notes-to-self, or known typos, but with ‘restored’ text. At the time I wrote it, I was still very much influenced by the book Game Over, which was about Nintendo. The first section of the test chapter isn’t directly about Lemmings, but leads into it thematically, and is by no means a comprehensive account of its creation. In particular I haven’t mentioned Gary Timmons, who added much to Mike’s original animation and refined the appearance of the Lemmings themselves. The full story awaits a fresh text and a broader scope.

DMA Test Chapter (1996)
At the time of Blood Money, the output from the young DMA still couldn’t be accused of originality. Both of Dave’s shoot-’em-ups had been inspired by specific arcade machines. In one early demo which he showed to the KACC, Menace displayed waving tentacles on one of the levels. Tentacles of the sort which had been seen in Salamander.
A horizontally scrolling game was inevitably going to be the product of Dave’s initial efforts, Salamander being his favourite game; he played it constantly in the Reform Street arcade, Dundee’s largest. The Amiga had custom hardware to provide two layers of scrolling, making it easier (and less CPU-intensive) to display spectacular moving screens. Of the few games available for the Amiga so far, none had made use of this ‘parallax’ scrolling.
Dave had a definite philosophy about how to name his products. Out was weird ‘made-up’ titles and in their place was the sort of name which could easily crop up on the news, magazines, or in conversation. Words or phrases which were in the general public consciousness. His thinking was that the title would appear in the normal course of event and people would begin to associate it with ‘that game.’ Hence, Blood Money; a title which was at one stage going to be called IOU.
In later years, naming came full circle. The possibility of lawsuits made the use of such easily recognised words too risky and there was a return to made-up names such as ‘Tanktics’ and ‘Kraniaks.’ A name search by a legal firm even saw risk in the use of ‘space station’ in a title, but oddly, not ‘silicon valley.’ At the start of the 90s, however, such concerns never surfaced.
Admittedly, most DMA game names were only accorded the status of ‘working titles’ which nevertheless made it intact all the way to release day. It was this spirit in which Lemmings was begun.

Scott Johnston joined DMA after responding to an advert in the local paper. Setting something of a trend, he was one in a line of Science Fiction fans; something which his art portfolio clearly showed. On being accepted into the company, he was assigned to another embryonic project: Walker. Despite applying as an artist, he was soon to show that he had programming skills too, often combining them to good effect. Within weeks he had written a program to generate graphics for the Walker’s head, over which fine detail could then be hand-animated. Initially, however, he had to draw small characters for the Walker to stomp over. He elected to make them 16 pixels by 16 in size.
Mike saw this and told him that the characters could be at least half the size and still look good. Scott didn’t believe him.
“But I’ve seen it before,” Mike insisted.
What he’d seen - and later dragged out in evidence - were the characters from Beachhead which had made incredible use of the C64’s limited resolution. Each character had been exquisitely animated. What had caught his attention in particular, was a character throwing a grenade. It was everything that animation should be; smooth, detailed and ignorant of the computer’s limitations. Here, they were brought to life in a grid of a mere 8x8 pixels. Without a copy to hand, though, Mike decided to prove his point over one dinnertime.
Ignoring Dave’s ban on eating chips, which stunk out the room, he fired up DPaint and proceeded to create a simple animation with small creatures. One after the other, they walked steadily up a hillside to the top where they - in a macabre sense of humour - got blasted to pieces by a laser, just before they made it to the end of the cliff.
Biscuit thought this was hilarious, so much that legend has it that he literally fell off of his chair, laughing. (It was suggested in a later year that DMA needed another reaction like that.) Russell, immortally, said, “Just like lemmings” and followed it with the moment in which Lemmings was truly born. With a laugh he said, “There’s a game in that…” and wondered how it would be possible to go about saving the poor creatures. Dave remembers it differently, with himself playing the role of saying there was a game in the animation. Mike is openly dismissive of that.
For his part, Scott didn’t react much when he was shown it later, but sure enough the characters in Walker soon shrank to the same dimensions.

Russell began work on the PC version, purely because time was available to him, several months before the Amiga version got going. The most common PC graphics standard at the time was CGA, which had a fixed - and limited - colour palette; white, green, blue and black. Lemmings had to make use of these colours and that is the reason why Lemmings have green hair. After a while, Russell had to put work aside to focus on converting Ballistix to the PC, at which stage the Amiga became the lead development platform. Mike worked for a time on the C64 version.
As a result, 1991 effectively became the Year of the Magazines. Never before or since had DMA Design ever had so much coverage [Note: obviously this was written before GTA!]. Other games would soon be released by others, which had been inspired by Lemmings to a greater or lesser degree. Extreme satisfaction was to be had in DMA, seeing those magazines universally call these games Lemmings-like or Lemmings-clones. No doubt existed that Lemmings had been unique in games history, and had in fact kicked off an entirely new genre: the ‘Save-’em-up.’

Some More DMA Witterings

2010-11-21T13:01:00.005Z

Wikipedia continues to confound me, and my feelings are decidedly mixed. Previously I'd written about how the DMA article claimed myself as one of the founder members, something which I found to be a rather amusing thought. I mentioned this to Mike Dailly, himself a founder member, and to my surprise he agreed with the article. I'd been thinking in terms of business, for which I'd played no part. But in terms of the four of us, including Dave Jones and Russell Kaye, sitting in the computer club canteen in 1984 discussing how cool it would be to makes games.... well, perhaps. It didn't exactly help in my post when I was in full obfuscation mode. And when the inventor of Lemmings calls me a founder member of DMA Design, I suppose I should listen. As Londo Mollari says in Babylon 5 , “I was there at the beginning...”

But it's odd how history is coming to judge this, and by history I mean the internet. Tonight on one of my not-as-frequent-as-you-think egosurfing sessions, I stumbled across an article which was written about Unirally , the Super Nintendo game. A couple of years ago I'd been asked a few interview questions, offered up my answers, and didn't think much more about it. Now I've found the article, The Making of Unirally, and am chuffed that some of my answers made it in. I'll post more about Unirally in due course, but suffice it to say that the manual I wrote was called “ often hilarious” in the article and “hilarious” in the comments. To coin a modern fanboi phrase: squeeee!

Which of course led to a more comprehensive search for myself with the qualifier “DMA”. This was the point that - contrary to information as recently as last year - the “founder member of DMA” infonugget is now everywhere ! This is what history, or at least the little corner which I'm in, will record. But confounding happens when, as tonight, I find that bits of my blog are being used as a Wikipedia reference. This is great! It means I'm an authority or some such damned thing. In the entry for Turbo Esprit, it repeats the BBC's Gameswipe claim that it was a direct inspiration for Grand Theft Auto, and uses my blog post as reference for the counterargument. Makes me sound controversial too! And calls me one of GTA's designers, which I'm really not. (Though Mike differs on this, maybe it was all my input on why it shouldn't be called 'Freeway' and the screeds of dialogue I wrote for it ). Perhaps, in the fashion of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently , I can make myself the brains behind every game DMA ever made just by the simple expedient of constantly denying that I'm any such thing.

And while I'm pasting in random thoughts, I had a vision of the future, of sorts. I now what picture my obituary will contain. When I sent off my interview answers, I also included a photo of myself for illustration which happens to be from the single weekend of my life when my haircut worked as advertised. It's about five years old now and makes me look like the sort of cool dude who's obviously super talented merely on the strength of the photo being both b/w and slightly out of focus. Which of course is why I picked that one. What I looked like at the time I actually wrote the manual was really, really geeky. And in colour.

And no, I'm not posting the picture just now, at least not until I've digitally removed the spot from my forehead.

ScotGovCamp

2010-08-20T16:44:00.000Z

Hefting around a video camera from time to time, in the course of making Intrepid or otherwise just being idle, means that I sometimes get asked to wave it around for altogether more noble purposes. T'Other'alf, for inscrutable reasons, was organising an Unconference; which as far as I could gather was a Conference but without the Conference bits. The closest I'd come to this was reading about the Fortean Times' Unconvention, although the “Un” part of that seemed more to do with the subject matter – werewolves, flying saucers, conspiracy theories and so forth – than the actual structure of the event itself. ScotGovCamp Blog

An Unconference, then was a conference without a fixed agenda. Attendees would shout out topic suggestions at the beginning and then everyone would sit in on the topic and chip in or not depending on their disposition. Oh, and it was also a GovCamp which is for people working in and around government; in this case government in Scotland.

And just like starting making Star Trek Fan Films back in 2003, I got involved because I had a video camera.

This was going to be different from amateur film-making, not in the least because I don't get an opportunity for a second take. Given that I wasn't actually in control of anyone, I might not even get a first take. And since the whole event was essentially an experiment to see how it went, I had little idea of what would be happening and where to position myself for capturing footage of the sort that I didn't know what it would be.

ScotGovCamp specifically was about digital Scotland, and drew together a wide range of people from local government, commentators on social issues, self-proclaimed geeks, librarians and civil servants. My impression was that the subject matter was nebulous, but that was perhaps just me who felt to be a bit of an outsider. Shooting was straightforward to begin with, before anyone had really arrived. A handful of people turned up and before the actual event kicked off proper, there was a lot of setting up to do. This was the easiest to film as I only had to wander around and point the camera at anything which looked interesting, such as setting up a display stand or people wandering past the Eduardo Paolozzi art installation. I had some fun filming transitions, panning from the roof down to the group standing round the registration table, filming the flashing lights on one of the walls or panning from the sculpture to people just arriving. I had no idea if I'd use them, it was just in case.

It was obvious early on that there was no way I'd be able to capture everything which happened on the day, given that it lasted much of the day and was split into three discussion rooms named Hume, Brown and Ferguson after Edinburgh University Alumni – Lesley's idea – and not after three varieties of quark particle - strange, bottom and charmed – which I was pushing for. But when everyone was still together in the atrium, I had a straightforward area of focus, Lesley and Dave Briggs giving the pep talk and assembling the agenda from the suggested topics. It was immediately before this that something unexpected happened.

When I'm either directing or doing camera for amateur fiction, there is a script and what transpires is known and accounted for. A live events means having to be responsive to things as they happen and when Dave asked everyone to introduce themselves and give a one-word response as to why they were here, something ever so slightly extraordinary happened. I pointed the camera at whoever was talking, including myself after only three or four people (whilst failing to understand the concept of “one” word) but them I found myself following the “focus” as each individual in turn gave their name, and their one word. Instantly it was one of those slick adverts, all soft-focus and warm fuzzies, selling you an emotion and a desire for something that you still don't understand. And I was in the centre of it. This was how I imagine a religious cult would indoctrinate me. (I'm good at making spurious connections.)

This remained a highlight, since it was obvious how to make a neat little video – only a couple of minutes long – from that part of the day. Actually putting it together of course is something I'll still have to sit at the video editing suite (desk in corner of living room) to do. Now a neat little video is something that is more problematic for something which represents the entirety of the day. Not being able to film everything means that I need to convey the flavour of it and do so without dragging. This is something that I'm still trying to figure out, since their wasn't a grand overarching scheme to begin with. In any case, once the preliminaries were over with, I wandered in and out of the various conversations which were taking place, trying to get as many angles as I could, concentrating on whoever was speaking at the time. What became obvious was that it would be extremely difficult even to cover a single train of thought form the participants. Self-organising seating favoured a circle which meant that often a dialogue was being held where I filmed one person but could only get the back of the head of the other.

Even putting finished video clips of a continuous minute or two minutes on the web would lack context enough to make sense of what was being said. Halfway through the day I was mooting the possibility of getting someone to provide a voice over in conjunction with any conclusions. In other words, I'd given myself a bunch of work by volunteering to film and would be giving myself even more work (another thing I excel at) the more I thought about it! And just dumping the whole two and a quarter hours worth of footage to the web would not exactly make for riveting viewing!

So what I have ahead of me is an exercise in transitions, crossfades, categorisations, titles and wishing that the video would self-organise too. But failing that, the classic fallback position is to stare at the clips until a moment of inspiration occurs, and hope that being on holiday doesn't derail me too much! But seriously, now it's just a matter of piecing it together.

Project MyWorld

2010-07-29T10:53:00.000Z

I always thought I had a finite supply of stories to tell about my time at DMA Design. But an announcement from Realtime Worlds, which I only saw this morning, made me realise that even something which was only a few minutes long can still be relevant today. RTW have been working for the last five years on Project MyWorld, an ambitious online world which mixes social networking and gaming. No doubt the subtleties are more nuanced than that and most of us will note that five years is a long time in technology.

Mike Dailly, whom I've now known for something like twenty six years, had been working on it in complete secrecy. But now that the story is out, I realise that I've known the seeds of it since 1996, an entire fourteen years ago. Dave Jones, now Mr RTW and ex Mr DMA had clearly been thinking about it for that long. Back then I worked in DMA's Design Department alongside Mike and Dave would often come in to talk about whatever was on his mind; normally an idea for a game or about games in general. (Or about cars.)

Mike and myself were working on a project known informally as The Space Game, a name it's kept to this day, where each player would take control of a particular console such as tactical or navigation, instead of an entire ship. It didn't ultimately progress very far, but it was during this time that Dave wandered into the design dept and we told him something of the plans for it. This was also midway through the development of GTA and Dave said wouldn't it be great if you could find a planet in the game, fly down to the surface and find a city where a game of GTA was taking place. Not only that, but if you drove past some guys by the side of a river, those guys could be playing a fishing game!

This, we all agreed, would indeed be great but at the time I didn't think any more of it than just another idea in a sea of ideas. Any developer, I'm sure, will tell you that they have many more ideas than could ever be brought to fruition in several lifetimes. And that was it, a small conversation that didn't have any great significance at the time. Obviously Dave had the seed of an idea even all that time ago and has never forgotten it. What drives all the best ideas isn't stakeholders or technology, though they may enable them.

No, what drives them is simply asking "Wouldn't it be cool if..."

I have a Bacon Number of 4!

2010-07-16T19:45:00.001Z

I was in Star Trek: Intrepid - Transitions and Lamentations (2009) with Nick Cook who was in Star Trek: Phase II - Blood and Fire part Two with Denise Crosby (2009) who was in Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) with Robert Wagner who was in Wild Things (1998) with.... Kevin Bacon!

A Lemmings Conversion in 36 Hours

2010-06-30T20:00:00.000Z

Hello Slashdotters! (I think that's traditional when your site gets a traffic spike, though in my case it's probably minimal. It's certainly the busiest few days my blog has ever seen! I've been registered for years, but hardly ever post. And then two +5 Interesting posts in 2 days.) So just to pick up the story, Lemmings – already one of the most widely ported games ever – has had another port, this time to the iPhone.

That wasn't a surprise to me, since Lemmings has even been ported to the ZX Spectrum (I own the machine it was developed on, or at least I did). News that it was ported from the “original” PalmOS made me blink not an eye. Doing it in 36 hours was pretty neat. So I posted some links for more Lemmings information and thought not that much more about it. I thought it was an official port, and as such it was a pretty delightful piece of news.

Nope. I was slightly fooled by the use of the word “original” and the screenshots which clearly showed the classic Lemmings graphics. Digging (pun!) more deeply, it was obviously the same sound samples, same music and same levels. Everyone was referring to it as a port, meaning taking the original and re-writing to run on a different machine. It certainly sounded official, but there was no connection to the original, and the guy was wanting to make it available on Apple's App Store. Which was the point that Sony stepped in with a cease and desist. All the graphics were their copyright.

I have to say that I agree with Sony.

Now I have to be clear that I've no problem with someone porting a game to another platform, particularly since he wrote his own code. Let's face it, as the director of some Star Trek fan films, I can hardly be critical of wanting to play in someone else's playground. But the problem begins when he has taken material from the original – the real original and copied it wholesale. Had he then followed up the code with new graphics and new sound then what we'd have is a clone of Lemmings, a lemmings-a-like game or something which was clearly inspired by Lemmings. An open-source Lemmings IV maybe.

And that would be great! Imitation and flattery and all that.

Oddly, though, copyright issues aren't what bothers me most.

My problem comes down to respect.

Nowhere in the 36 Hour Lemmings blog is any mention of the original DMA creators. As I once wrote in one of DMA's manuals, we are “real people”. We have families, we have wives, we have girlfriends, we have children and this is how we earn our living. We aren't just some anonymous barcoded numbers in a database. We think, we live, we feel and we care about what we do. To have spent two years working on a game just to find someone selling copies at a car boot sale (yard sale) as I've experienced, hurts dreadfully. It's an insult and is disrespectful.

Copyright aside, getting in touch would have been a potent gesture, simply to ask if we were cool with making a clone, or even just an acknowledgement in the game itself. (I once saw a complete rip of the Hired Guns manual text, which I'd written, complete with an extensive “thanks to” a list of cracker buddies, but no mention of anyone who spent years making the game itself.)

Some posters are delighted that he's sticking it to The Man, who in this case is Sony. Sony didn't create Lemmings. DMA Design created Lemmings, which was published by Psygnosis who were later bought by Sony. The Lemmings concept, was created by Mike Dailly. It was coded by Dave Jones with graphics by Gary Timmons and Scott Johnson. There are more credits of course, but sitting in that office we were hardly the embodiment of The Man. We were doing this because it was cool and because it mattered to us.

And for me at least, because ultimately our works are all that we leave behind.

BBC Radio Scotland

2010-04-05T13:18:00.001Z

It's always amazing how persistant DMA Design has been in my life. Immediately after the museum exhibition opened, I was interviewed by James Christie from BBC Radio Scotland as one of the founders of DMA Design. You can read my thoughts on being a 'founder' elsewhere on the blog, though it's certainly true that, in the fashion of Londo from Babylon 5, "I was there at the beginning..."

It was to be a half hour documentary, and it has just aired this morning. I'm always nervous when something is broadcast with a contribution from me in it. And, yes, it's still amazing when I think about it, that I can casually write a sentence like the previous one. This one, however, was especially nerve-wracking for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on. Would I sound OK? Did I make sense? Would my contribution even get used?

Fortunately the answer was yes, and now I'm left with a curious mix of nostalgia and excitement, even as I realise that only a small fraction of my interview was used and only those parts which fitted the 'narrative' that documentaries use. I'm sure it was the same for both Mike and Russel who were also part of it. But it means that there's a huge amount of story that hasn't been told, that doesn't exist on Wikipedia or anywhere else aside from in our heads and the odd fragment on a website here and there. I close my eyes and I can see the old, old, office.

I recorded some important events in a journal I kept at DMA in 1996, but I so wish that I'd done the same for 1995, 1994, 1993... But of course at the time none of us had any idea that DMA would be important and very little was jotted down and nothing at all formally recorded. It makes the piecing together of DMA's history an exercise in deductive work where I still have scraps of paper, or tickets to hint at the exact date something occurred.

And that's what it was like in the days before blogs, twitter and 24/7 recording, when it was still possible for a mythology to arise.

You're definitely over the hill when...

2010-03-07T17:42:00.001Z

... you've literally become a museum exhibit. Seriously, this has just happened to me. I thought hitting 40 was a doozy, but it has nothing on this. Incidentally I'm using the word literally in the sense of actually being literal. Dundee's MacManus Galleries has just completed several years worth of refurbishment, opening last weekend. Part of the exhibit is some comparatively modern Dundee history, namely DMA Design. (Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto, worked for them, yadda yadda, you know the drill.)

I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but was informed by my family that my photo is part of it, and my name too! Now this is all very lovely and I've no problem with that, especially since it was mainly enabled by Mike Dailly who, like myself, was there from the start and has a ton of stuff hoarded from the early days. Early, as in late eighties onwards.

Being late on a Sunday, I ran down to the place since I am literally (in the sense of being literal) five minutes walk from the place, but unfortunately got there just as they were closing and told me to get out. My ego is not quite at the stage where I can legitimately say "don't you know who you're talking to"...

Oh well, so I got out and so far haven't seen it yet.

All very lovely, as I say, but I can't help feeling that an invite to the opening would have been nice...

Long Overdue Update

2010-02-27T13:36:00.001Z

There's plenty things been going on the last few months and they're all continuing. I've finally got a mostly finished version of the Bit Patterns script currently at the being-scrutinised stage of development. I'm hopefully going to get some feedback in the next few weeks at which point I have to write some additional scenes, make good any places where it's lacking (too many characters is an obvious one!) and give it a final polish. With any luck, we can get it into pre-production by the summer. Still very excited by this as it'll be Intrepid's first original movie.

I'm also working on a script/design for a computer game of which I can't say too much, suffice that it's still the early days and will likely take increasing amounts of my time as the year progresses. And bear in mind that I do all this stuff in my spare time - which is only laughingly called free! More details when I'm able to talk about it freely.

The editing of the Intrepid episode The Stone Unturned is almost finished. Myself and Nick filmed the last outstanding scene last weekend, which went smoothly - I wish all the scenes were like that - and also a short scene for Star Trek: Odessey, another fan film series. The only "setback" was hooking up the camera to the microphone, where a loose connection inside the audio connector box resulted in a lot of crackling. So instead we used the HD camera in DV mode. Nick was kind enough to edit together the Stone Unturned scene to take a little pressure off of me.

Speaking of filming, we're tentatively scheduled to do some filming in a fortnight's time for The Conviction of Demons, the latest Intrepid episode. Nick is nominally directing this one, his first time, whilst I'm doing camera. When we shot the first scene (production-wise, not Scene 1) in Perth a few months back, I was still so used to being director that I was shouting "Action" and "Cut"!

Finally, I'm dabbling away at a novel, the idea of which I'd had literally twenty years ago. Only now am I feeling confident enough to actually write it, but I'm having to fit it in amongst everything else because other people are involved in the other endeavours and that's a commitment! It's been simmering away at the back of my mind for all that time. Part of my motivation for doing an Open University course back in 1998 - Astronomy and Planetary Science (passed!) - was to get a good handle on how a supernova worked, a central part of the book!

And finally, finally, I'm working on a large blog post about Body Harvest, an old DMA Design game which I was involved in.

There's other stuff I wish I had time to do, but I suspect that'l always be true. Too many ideas and not enough time.

Alison Rowat and the Licensed Imagination

2009-11-15T13:19:00.001Z

This post is possibly ever so slightly out of date, being a letter to the Glasgow Herald which I posted on the Intrepid forum three years ago but never quite polished to the extent that I was happy sending it to the herald itself. Prompting this, and other rejoinders by Intrepid members, was an article by Alison Rowat about the then [Glasgow Science Fiction convention] which some of us considered tantamount to bigotry, had it been said against one of the traditional minority groups. I've rewritten my rebuttal so that it flows better. At the time of writing the original, I was very, very angry. Perhaps it could function as an open letter to other media types – and there are many – who see us poor SF types as an easy and not altogether human target.

Dear Sir,
    It's long been a truism that to gauge the accuracy of a newspaper, you should simply read a column about a subject with with you are closely familiar. So it is rather disappointing to be presented with Alison Rowat's article 'You wouldn't believe the warp factor' which contains nary a shred of anything approaching a keen observation, let alone a solid fact.
A little research surely couldn't have gone amiss?

Such as this odd obsession with tin-foil. It's a nice little hook to hang the rest of the article from, so it's a shame that tin-foil hats are synonymous with 1950s paranoia about communist 'mind-control'. Not exactly Star Trek or Star Wars, which are precisely two entries in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction out of some four and a half thousand. Perhaps it's a surprise that there can be such a thing as an Encyclopaedia, but sure enough it turns out that SF is even a literary genre stretching back hundreds of years. Surely the people described in her article couldn't be... atypical?

Of course, says Alison, why would anyone wish to dress up as their favourite character at all? It's not like anyone dresses as characters from soaps, after all, although the remarkable upsurge in little girls named 'Kylie' at the height of Neighbours should give pause for thought as to exactly who is 'sad'.   I'm sure that a few of us have waved a lightsabre, imagined or otherwise, in anger. But so far as I know, no SF fan has ever sent a real cheque for 5000 pounds to help free a fictional character from a fictional prison, as happened with Coronation Street.
    I'll save myself time by blithely assuming that all non-SF fans have a blurred line with reality.

Of course I myself cannot 'fathom the insanity' that makes grown men dress in football tops. After all, on the basis of the last few years, you're seemingly more likely to be killed or seriously injured by a footballer than a terrorist. What kind of aspiration is that?

But I'm not a football fan, I'm an SF fan and as such I'm generally fair game to be mocked in the press and on television. Somehow I'm now a stereotype, not an individual, but of now part of a group whom you can malign with impunity.

How well do I measure up to this image that you have in your head? Spandex? Don't own any. Social skills? Got some. Women? Some close friends. Relationships? Had them too. In one now. Beer belly? I'm a man in my mid-thirties, what do you expect I'm going to look like? Would you like to call me a fat bastard, or is that not politically correct? I wear glasses too, so I expect you'd like to call me four eyes or speccy or something. You know, make fun of my appearance in the absence of anything with any thought behind it.

Or don't we do things like that in the 21st Century? Such niceties don't apply to SF fans it would seem. I like SF and so I'm some kind of freak and to hell with how it makes me feel when I hear you say that.

How appropriately ironic, then, that one of the central themes of Star Trek, which you deride, is that in the future we all have respect for one another. Imagine that.

I did, however, manage to retain my imagination.

Not, admittedly, a valuable commodity in these cynical days, cynicism being a theme often reflected in... oh... modern SF. Just as the subtext of some of those old novels about aliens was about what's it's like for a society to look upon anyone, anything, point and laugh for being something different that we don't understand.
Hmm, now where have I heard that before...

But soft SF is OK apparently – I can imagine Alison campaigning for tolerance zones where one may have an imagination with an appropriate license – but anything more that is implicitly 'hard' and to be discouraged.

Well this is where research comes in handy (you were once columnist of the year weren't you, Alison? Do you remember what “research” is?) since there really is a term called 'hard SF' which deals stories more closely coupled to real, solid, actually existing science and logic. About as far away from dressing up as your favourite character as it's possible to get.
Enjoying a story where you have to think? Preposterous and dangerous!

At this point I do have to apologise for attempting to use a 'philosophical' and 'intellectual' defence of my 'art' without exploring believers in flying saucers, on the grounds that the two groups are not the same. Is this a surprise to you?
Oh sure there are UFOs in Science Fiction, but only in the same way that Eastenders is a police drama.

Without getting deep about it, I simply like Science Fiction. I'm in a minority, and don't I know it when there are so many pejorative terms for me. To deny that there really are people – people, not just men – with a more than everyday interest would be plain wrong. But to say that all of them are like the colourful minority is equally wrong. I was at a convention just recently and almost an entire half of the attendees were woman. One of them was dressed as Lara Croft and nobody there or in the press, oddly, felt the need to complain about that...

I'll anticipate the defence that the article was humour. Not a gentle humour by any means, not well observed humour, definitely not original and with an obvious lack of contact with, or understanding of, anyone being talked about. Just mean-spirited barbs thrown at crudely sketched caricatures.

Alison, it's obvious that you don't even know who your target is and would it be churlish of me to point out the logical flaw of writing 'they want to stay in their safe little worlds, not connect with others' in an article about SF fans gathering together in the world's largest convention?

Seriously, did you really write that? I must have just imagined it.

But the final word must surely go to one of my SF loving friends who saw the article, read the part about sad single men and exclaimed: “That's hilarious, I'll have to show my wife.”

Regards,
     Steve Hammond

Grand Theft Auto (via Gameswipe)

2009-11-01T18:42:00.006Z

Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe, being a BBC overview of computer games history, inevitably got to the point where it mentioned GTA. The programme was a fun once-over by the jaded eye of Brooker and I enjoyed catching all the old games I recognised, with a spark of memory, the ones I was familiar with and being amazed by the new ones since I departed the industry. Although I'd known of the controversy at the time, I hadn't really paid much attention, and seeing it in context was quite enlightening. Just how much passion had flared over this game was put into persective, with archive BBC news clips and talking heads decrying it. All the controversy, all the hype, but not much that I didn't know or was surprised by except for this little nugget: GTA was “directly inspired by” Turbo Esprit, a game for the Spectrum.

Um. What?

That was... different. Quick summary: I worked for DMA Design from 1991 to 1997, and hung around Dave Jones doing freelance graphics work for him before that and attending the same computer club and college as him; all going back to around 1984. Turbo Esprit is a new one on me. And naturally this is just an excuse for me to talk about GTA again and by extension, me. My involvement with GTA was tangential, as at the time my main concern was writing the story and background material for Body Harvest, but it did mean that I was present for a handful of meetings and acted as a kind of low-level disruptive influence. Other than dialogue writing, I play-tested it at my desk within the design department, so I had a fantastic view of the process of creating the most controversial game ever to come out of Scotland. Which is not to say that I necessarily remember all of it!

I've read a number of the “histories” of GTA which are dotted around the web and they all cover pretty much the same ground in not very much detail. GTA IV gets the bulk of the commentary unsurprisingly enough, being the acme of the supposed “murder simulator” genre. Not any of them that I've seen were written by anyone connected with the project. Dave is interviewed, but the origin of GTA isn't given much, if any, space. Indeed it's mentioned in places that if you are familiar with GTA IV, GTA the original will come as a surprise.

Everyone knows, it seems, that the original name was Race 'n' Chase, but no-one knows that one of the suggested names was Freeway, a name that I pointed out was also the name of the dog in Hart to Hart, at which point it got dropped. Mike Dailly coded up the graphics engine that was the basis of GTA. This system was informally called Legovision and I think the engine predated the concept of the game itself, which makes the Turbo Esprit influence nonsensical. No-one had ever mentioned it.

I have a better candidate for the influence of GTA and it dates back to 1990 when Dave had the very first office (I was freelance at the time), and we were taking part in the ITV Telethon. Our goal was writing an entire game in 24 hours, and it was a car racing game with a top down view. Being an amalgam of all the racing games we could think of, we called it Super Off-Road Hot Turbo Buggy Simulator. And at the same time a game we had been playing in the office was a Commodore 64 game where you drove a car around a city, called Siren City... How Dave got the idea for GTA, I can't say for sure, but there were more potent influences than Turbo Esprit.

One of the curious things within the histories is the occasional reference to the low production values of the graphics, especially since this was 1997/98. It's possible I was insulated from the outside world when GTA was being put together, but at the time – and as far as I can see it hasn't changed – all the big name games had the same colour palette. Doom set the template, and for years after it was murky greys, browns and dark greens. Most first person shooters looked the same. Indeed in one of the design documents I wrote at the time – unconnected with GTA – I pasted screenshots from Quake, Unreal and a few others to illustrate at a glance how difficult it was to tell the games apart. One of the other guys in the Design Department, Stewart Graham, was especially keen on not having dowdy visuals. Bright, cartoony graphics were specifically intended to make GTA look unlike other games. As a secondary concern, it fitted the nature of the gameplay which wasn't deadly serious; it was fun. What many people fail to remember is that GTA was in large part a pisstake. You only have to look at the faux adverts around the printed map to see that.

This I the point that I have to introduce Brian Baglow. Brian has, so far in my life, been the only person ever to land me in shit with the management on a charge of blasphemy. As architect-in-chief of our freshly minted intranet, I apparently bore the responsibility for everyone's profile Q&A. Brian's answers were slightly spicy, and not at all respectful of the, say, devout believer in a higher power. I passed them without comment because they were fantastically funny. But a single individual disagreed and I had to carry the can for it. Brian's response was to rewrite them to be as fluffy and cute as you could imagine... and equally funny. Brian's sense of humour drove much of GTA.

At the same time as I was writing never-to-be-used dialogue for the original, I was also throwing around never-to-be-used ideas and occasionally acting as a sounding board for Brian. Which is why for a brief moment, controversial though GTA was, it could have contained a rather different message. At the time, a number of arcade games had a prominent FBI logo stating “Winners Don't Use Drugs”, though quite how FBI jurisdiction extended to the high street of Dundee was never clear. Nevertheless, we both thought it was pretty amusing.

GTA, even before it was released, was obviously a pretty subversive game. In one of those meetings of just myself and Brian, more to get away from the hustle and bustle than a proper meeting, I came up with the idea of subverting our own subversion. When the main character opened the suitcase at the end of the game, the thing would explode and the game would end with a parody of the logo saying “Crime Doesn't Pay”.

We thought it was a funny thing to do, to be able to say “Hey, we're responsible and are conveying a responsible message!” Needless to say it never ended up that way, because it was around that time that the carrot of becoming freelance was once more dangled in front of me and I ended up taking it. It was only ever intended that I'd spend two months on GTA, and I'd like to think that my most lasting effect was inspiring Brian to ever-greater heights of lunacy. And as for Gameswipe, surely there is a case for digging out all those old industry mainstays and the BBC making a full in-depth series about computer games history. I for one would be delighted to contribute.
---
Images in this post taken from Mike Dailly's Flickr stream, who got much of them from my DMA Design Macintosh (which I had from them as a leaving gift) where I stored them all, packrat style, in the first place!

The Circle is Complete!

2009-10-04T06:09:00.000Z

A while back I wrote about the veracity of the Hired Guns background story as it appears in Wikipedia. Short version: you can't trust the article. Longer version: I can't add my own history because my recollections are not a proper reference, even though I wrote the damn story in the first place.

So now I'm delighted to see that the HG entry now links to a proper reference, in this case to Gamasutra – to a page discussing the history of computer games. The amusing part about this is the description it gives on the Hired Guns backstory; that the supposed hostages are merely a ruse to draw in some mercenaries for a live field test of their new weapons systems.

Now the only place that this version of the story has ever appeared on the internet is when I wrote it into the Wikipedia article, for reasons discussed in that other post. Which means that Gamasutra is obtaining its information from Wikipedia, which is now obtaining that very same information from Gamasutra!

The circle is, as they say, complete!

And for value-added lols, I now have an insight into the kind of time-travel story where a time-traveller accidentally kills Shakespeare as a young man and is forced to take his place and write all of Shakespeare's works to restore history (because he just happens to have them all memorised). Where, then, does the information come from in the first place?

The answer, of course, is a Wikipedian editor who lives outside of time.

Carl Sagan Sings!

2009-10-01T20:01:00.003Z

A strange and compelling and downright geeky thing, that nevertheless I've been playing solidly for the last twenty minutes. I was given the book Cosmos as a kid and it's shaped everything since. Never since Sagan has science meshed so seemlessly with poetry.

Here's where you can find the original with some downloadables

Update from the Maemo

2009-09-20T09:04:00.002Z

The 'maemo' being the Nokia N810 I bought a few weeks ago because my Samsung Omnia was being such a pain in the arse. So I'm attempting to blog from somewhere other than an actual computer. This may be less considered than some of my other posts. In any case, the miscellaneous requirements of being both a Sunday morning and in the back room compell me to write trivia. The N810 makes an excellent eBook reader and in conjunction with free eBooks and a small pile of real books I've borrowed and bought, I have much more pending being read than at any other time in my life! Time to prioritise.

All of which is making me slightly angsty that I'm not pursueing the writing as much as I think I ought to be. I've made decent progress rewriting Bit Patterns to be an original screenplay and my serious novel is sitting at 15000 words of background notes (which would be novella sized all by itself.) Oh, and I've now got a paid writing gig which kicks off in Jan. But I can't talk about that yet. ;)

All of which says nothing about Intrepid. I'm a quarter of the way through fine-tuning the edit of The Stone Unturned. Any more commitments and I'm going to sag in the middle!

Overpackaged

2009-09-08T18:39:00.000Z

I ordered a keyboard adaptor - the tiny purple thing in the corner - and had to collect it from a neighbour, because it wouldn't fit through my letterbox. So, Amazon.... what were you thinking?

Bit Patterns Redux

2009-08-30T20:13:00.001Z

Recently I completed the first draft of a screenplay for Intrepid, that old Star Trek fan film for which I've directed a number of episodes. The story takes place shortly after the events of the pilot episode. It was quite a journey getting it to the point where it made sense to me, let alone to the stage where it made sense to anyone who read it. Events in the Intrepid universe overtook some of the plot points and I had to rewrite it, an actor who played a key role wasn't available so that meant another rewrite. A lot of headscratching and aha moments occurred before the stage where it was actually, genuinely complete.

The night that happened, I had a short list of items I needed to change, points I needed to make and dialogue I had to invent. One by one I got through them. Completing the script came as a surprise – adding the last item meant adding some extra lines just to bring that scene to a natural end. And... oh.... it's done.

This was in stark contrast to the first major story (in terms of mere wordcount) I'd written when I was younger and didn't really understand the concept of polishing the work. Even though there was a huge gap between writing the first half and coming back to write the second half, I'd know since the very first paragraph what the very last line was going to be. In those days I started at the beginning and wrote linearly until the end. Writing those last words was an incredible experience and I was bouncing off the wall for days.
So the unexpected completion of Bit Patterns may have been a hint that I wasn't done with it yet. Oh sure, it was finished but that didn't mean it was done.

So. A couple of weeks ago myself and Nick had an extended discussion about the future of Intrepid and part of that was the other possible projects that were always there but never seemed to get to item one on the agenda. We'd always wanted to do an original piece of work once Intrepid was at an end (if indeed it ever was – I once said to him that if Intrepid was a success we'd never be allowed to stop making it.).

I'd been thinking about the timescales, which made me squeak uncontrollably. The next Intrepid script, Nick's Conviction of Demons, is a monster. After the readthrough, I estimated that it'd have a running time of at least two and a quarter hours. And that means a couple of years making it, though that depends on how efficient we can get. Bit Patterns was almost as large. So that meant a couple of years plus whatever additional time before we could have something full-sized and original finished. That's a while to wait, since we've been doing Intrepid since 2003.

So I made a suggestion that I'd been thinking about all the previous week and after much soul-searching, we're going ahead with it.

And that means I'm re-writing Bit Patterns to be an original script. Not Star Trek. Original. And once I've finished - really finished – I'll be directing a Science Fiction film. It feels great to be able to type that! Even if it means that I've just given myself a lot more work for the same total of completed screenplays: 1.

What this means is that I have to do the obvious things such as changing character names. What's possibly less obvious is that I also have to change the character motivations and backgrounds and relationships. I have to change the technology. I have to change the backstory of the whole universe it's set in. And that's the say nothing of all the additional scenes that will be necessary to do establishing in a way that simply isn't required for Star Trek.

This will be an interesting experience.

Adventurous Scots

2009-08-13T10:30:00.000Z

That would be me.

Seems that there's been a recent study showing that we'd all rather stay in and watch TV or waste time on the Internet. Well, that's pretty much true as far as I'm concerned, but nothing beats actual data. So on this morning's adventurous trip to the shops with the express purpose of obtaining caramel cheesecake, to undo the cycling I did the other day, I was stopped by someone from the Evening Telegraph.

She was looking to speak to ten people and ask then what adventurous thing they'd done recently. It's a regular feature in the paper where the public is asked a question. What had I done? Aside from visiting the crash site of the light aircraft in the park earlier on (the pilot was OK and more of which later), I thought the perfect answer was a plug for Intrepid. After all, as I said, we'd been filming at Glen Doll which gave us the opportunity to go camping and do some hillwalking; an excellent antidote to sedentary habits.

I've no idea whether it's ten people or it's more and whittled down to ten. Hopefully I'll make the cut!

Update:
Yep. I've just been in the Mon 17th edition along with nine others. Intrepid itself wasn't mentioned, although it did say about Star Trek fan films and the wilds and cliffs. The actual quote from me contains about 60% of my own words!

Light Aircraft Crash

2009-08-13T09:20:00.000Z

You'll probably have seen the news about the light aircraft which crashed in Dundee yesterday. Luckily the pilot was OK. I heard about this last night and this morning I took the opportunity to bike up to the golf course where it happened and take a few snaps before the plane gets removed.

And here's a link to what the aircraft was like in better times. One of my hobbies is looking at newspaper archives in the local library. I am absolutely sure that this isn't the first time an aircraft has crashed in Caird Park, the other time being in the 1940s. However despite trawling through my notes, I can't find any reference to it. Does anyone know for sure?

Update:
I was right. The Evening Telegraph website now reports that a Hurricane had crashed in Caird Park on July 28th, 1943. Damn, now if only I'd found my note I could have been the first on the web with this snippet of info.

A Wikipedia Upgrade

2009-07-22T20:57:00.001Z

Something I learnt in school was that what we were taught in primary school was merely an approximation of the “truth”. What we were taught in secondary was a closer approximation and university was a closer approximation yet!I And so I've had an idea for a updating of Wikipedia. It would be fairly major thing to do, but I think it would be not only cool but useful too. This isn't in the category of “fixing” Wikipedia, which seems to be a theme these days, but of improving it's capability. This is of course assuming that someone hasn't already thought of it or is currently salivating of the prospect of getting venture capital for a rival startup. I'd do it myself, but y'know, I'm too busy working out how to save the world and all that!

Anyway, I've noticed – it wasn't difficult – that the various entries for Wikipedia are pitched at vastly different degrees of understanding. If you need convincing of this, just check out some of the finer details of statistics. Some of those articles go into considerable depth about very technical concepts, others are stubs. Even when an article is complete, it can contain nothing that would tax you. On the other hand it can contain complex equations.

But this isn't to say that an outline or overview of a topic can't be written which combines those approaches. A book might start with beginner's material and slowly build towards advanced learning. In other words, the same topic can be written about for a different audience at different times and places. It can be a definitive reference work, or a light sketch merely the gist of it. So why not build this capability into Wikipedia in a Web 2.0 fashion? OK, so I'm completely ignoring how it would be implemented in practice, but how might it look?

Each section of the page, in addition to the “edit” control has a “info depth” control, say 1 to 5 or some other scale such as “easy” to “hard”. Clicking on the appropriate control changes the section, or the entire page, to the new informational depth. So on depth 1 you might get an explanation of geopolitics or quantum chromodynamics in language suitable for the layman, whereas on depth 5 you might get the same but with equations and technicalities suitable for degree students studying the subject.

That's it. That's all it would take.

It would even be possible to write Wikipedia pages to take this into account right now. A page at the moment is titled Quantum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum). How much harder would it be to have a few extra pages titled Quantum_Easy and Quantum_Hard. It could apply everywhere and doesn't even require any changes behind the scenes.

And that's my Big Wikipedia Thought!

So what happens if I say yes?

2009-07-19T12:07:00.000Z

I had this interesting situation develop on my "beloved" Omnia recently. Unavailable is available! Black is white and up is down!

Too Tasty for Geeks

2009-07-13T20:06:00.006Z

For the last few years I've totalled up a conclusion that there must be some kind of undeclared cultural war going on. Whilst we've progressed as a civilisation to the point where denigration of all the obvious minorities is rightly condemned, you can always rely on marketers to find new and exciting demographics to be horrible to. I think myself and others like me have been identified as enemy combatants, or at least collateral damage in waiting, because we're now demonised as disgusting statistical outliers who can't be sold a lifestyle.

A handful of years ago, I decided that I wanted to get myself a new mobile phone. After a short while being wowed by failing my saving throw, as Charles Stross puts it, against “The Shiny” and I went for a Sony Ericsson. It looked good and came with all sorts of features I was partial to, including a camera which was still quite rare. Money spent, I was quite pleased with it, up until the advertising campaign began.

Inadvertently, I'd become an early adopter, and now it had hit the mainstream. For several weeks, whenever I watched anything on a commercial channel for longer than seven minutes, there was my phone; the same model being the centrepiece of an upmarket party. It was passed from trendy person to trendy person, free from constraints of gravity and any other physics you'd care to name as it floated, spun, bounced and was caressed by a light stoke of the hand. One might have assumed that its case was fashioned from a fragment of the True Cross(tm) with an operating system coded up by Jesus.

What a cool object this was!

All of which was the advert's opinion of course, which had on me the opposite effect of now being embarrassed to own phone because I looked like a pretentious tosser. In my daily attire of tattered jeans (wear and tear, not designer) and plain t-shirt, I worried that others would see me as though I had designs on being part of some nebulous happening scene.
I'm not sure who those 'others' were, exactly, because the sort of people I hang about with are more likely to say cool at the 'cool' at the number of colours, or size of memory or miscellaneous feature (such as having a built-in camera – yes it was that long ago) that the phone possessed, and not the brute fact of it existing at all. Geek cool, in others words and not some slick marketing bollocks. I caught myself yelling at the TV “But what does it do???” They had explained nothing. The entirety of the concrete information the advert had actually passed on to the viewer was: this is a phone. Wow.

Which was when it sunk in that had I seen the advert first I wouldn't have bought it. In fact I would have avoided it with festering prejudice. Because at no point in the ad campaign was any kind of feature mentioned. See this? It's cool. And that was it. I would have bought one based on what it could do, how it did it, and whether or not it would keep me occupied playing with it and figuring out what neat things I could do with it. (One of which turned out to be getting a photo of Saturn when I pressed the lens against the eyepiece of the large telescope at Mills Observatory).

Shorter version: I'm a Geek.

Or to state it another way, I am not concerned about style but about function. At least that's what I tell myself. A lecturer at my old college once told us that he'd analysed all the various features of cars and had plumped for a Skoda, at a time when Skoda was the single most derided brand in the country. We all laughed him down and I wasn't apart from it either. Brands are potent things.

It's not exactly a deep insight to observe that most products are selling a lifestyle not the product itself, but I worry when we've got to the point where the sort of critical thought needed to analyse the claims of the advertisers is actively derided. A current Tesco advert tells me that its typical shoppers' baskets are cheaper than Asda. The fine print at the bottom of the screen says 'based on 10% of clubcard transactions'. What happened to the other 90%? How is a typical basket defined? Is the 10% taken from all times of the day and all times of the week? Did they do this many times and cherry picked the favourable results? Does the typical basket for midweek vary from the typical basket On Saturday when we're restocking bread and milk? And is the typical basket different again on Friday when we're after cheep beer? Cheaper than Asda? They way they stated it is meaningless. But we take it all in.

Clearly this is not aimed at me, in the same way that the Sony advert appealed to a different group. Few of us take notice of these things, but us geeky folk care about the technicalities, about the numbers, about what's real. And aside from specialist websites, the geek demographic hasn't been targeted. Perhaps it's too small to market to, or more likely the ad bods just don't understand us. Most likely of all, they just can't conceive of a group of people for whom selling a lifestyle doesn't work. All they know is that we're different and different is bad.

Which is where the atomic artillery in the cultural war was unleashed. Can't market to them? Demonise them instead. I wish I could remember the brand – I think it was Shreddies - so that I could shame it, but in any case this was a cereal advert, aimed at children, simply, gaudily proclaiming that it was “too tasty for geeks”. Hey you! You at the back getting bullied? You getting picked last for the sports teams? You who actually enjoys learning? We'll we think you're worthless. Eat something else. We don't want you.

It's not cool to think.

Epistemology pt 3: How I founded a Star Trek club

2009-06-28T11:41:00.002Z

Years ago I thought of a neat thing to do, which I titled (in my head anyway) the Newspaper Calibration Project. The idea was that a press release or other definitive document would be set free, anything that subsequently appeared in a newspaper could be checked for accuracy. Hence, the newspapers would them be calibrated against a known standard. (You can tell I've got a technical background...) The mere details of how to actually do such a thing didn't emerge from the walk in a conservation area I was on at the time; it was just too idyllic to keep my mind on computers. And so the idea lapsed, along with the evolving document project, where downloaders of said document would modify it and then upload it back. One genetic algorithm later and the “meaning of existence” would then slowly emerge from selection pressure.

Download it, modify it and then upload it back? Obviously well before Web 2.0 came along. But I digress.

We've all wondered just how accurate the newspapers we read really are, and what biases are present and just how good the quality of reporting is. (At least I hope we all do that...) The Newspaper Calibration Project was never anything more than a bit of whimsy, but since 2007 I've had a chance to perform a calibration of a sort for real, something most of us never have the opportunity for. It all started with an unlikely bout of publicity for Intrepid, where our little fan film was mentioned in passing on the front page of the New York Times, complete with the web address. A huge spike of traffic on the web site alerted us to the impending attention, followed by a flood of inquiries from local and national news. I think by the time we were done, I'd been in at least five papers – and asked “how did you come to be making a movie” a million or so times.

This lasted for a good few weeks.

Looking back, here was a chance to compare what we knew about ourselves with what was reported in a newspaper, with the added benefit that it was a nice little “and finally” kind of story with no obvious reason for any overt biases. Needless to say some papers were more rigorous ensuring info-fidelity than others, but at the poorer end of the scale it got really poor. At it's best, we had two newspapers – The Guardian and the Scotsman – doing what appeared to be a properly serious endeavour. Both of them asked questions, took notes and appeared genuinely interested in how we came to be making what they termed a “tribute film”. The Scotsman in particular, in the form of Jim Gilchrist, impressed me by not only taking notes and recording the conversation, but by repeatedly asking confirmation of details. This is journalism as we should all wish it, and the resulting article was excellent.

Both took at least an hour to wrap up. Then the Guardian, after the main interview was over, had an informal chat with us and lightly cautioned us to be careful of what we said to the tabloids – even if they liked us. And in the event the tabloids did like us. The stories they wrote didn't make fun of us – much – and aside from the usual puns for headlines, they took the tone: hey, isn't this weird and interesting, instead of: hey, check out these sad gits.

All of which has nothing to do with the accuracy of what they wrote. I'm told by Nick that one interview took a whole two minutes on the phone while he was in the middle of something at work. The result from that was that he got muddled with me, my quotes were attributed to him, his quotes were attributed to me, all without any discernible pattern. But wait a moment, didn't I just say that the “interview” was only with Nick? How come I could be quoted if I wasn't even there? Because a huge chunk of it appeared to be lifted from the Guardian wholesale. Oh well, just a small screw up and quite an obvious mistake once it's pointed out. But it gets odder.

I was quoted as saying “It's a rocky road, but we'll get there” in response to a question about finishing the movie. Well yes, I did indeed say those words to the Guardian in response to an entirely different question: “What's the appeal of the future in Star Trek?”, an altogether higher-minded question. This is what it means to be quoted out of context, and when I now hear of some celebrity or public figure complaining about being misquoted, I am much more sympathetic.

There was worse for Nick, however. One of his quotes was pure invention. He has never referred to his wife, Lucy, as “The Missus”; he just doesn't talk like that. I've never heard him deliver a line like that and I've known him almost twenty years. Supposedly she demanded a part and he caved in. Er, I tell you three times no. And such factual errors were almost as an aside; a major plot point disguised as a throwaway line. In passing, that's how it came to be me who founded a Star Trek club.

But what can you do, eh?

It's almost funny that this particular “fact” about me has now been repeated last month in the latest round of publicity for Intrepid, the same paper looking at what they've written before and using it uncorrected. I am content to say that it arises from basic miscommunication, and while perhaps bad enough in a tiny way, it's not the most worrying development. Overall, and I don't just include the tabloids in this, I have seen how the story of the rise of our – and other - Trek fan films has been altered at what is probably a subconscious level by most of the newspaper and television coverage. No matter how often we called it a “fan film” the media in the UK at any rate, lacking the appropriate cultural references and insight, called them “tribute films”. I can understand this, as it needed to be presented to a mainstream audience. Incorrect, but deliberately so. Though STV bizarrely referred to the latest episode as a spoof, which unlike the other errors I've seen actually hurt. But the worst part of the departure from truth was why they thought we were doing it.

Almost universally, they have assumed – or been told bluntly otherwise and ignored it, and I know this because myself and Nick have said so to reporters faces – that ourselves and others had started making Star Trek fan films because Enterprise had been cancelled and there was no longer any official Trek on the small screen. No more Star Trek, so we decided to do it ourselves. This is as wrong as it gets. We were making Intrepid several years before Enterprise was cancelled. Exeter and Hidden Frontier, for just two examples, have been going for much longer yet. So why did they say that?

Simply, because it makes for a more satisfying narrative. Plucky amateurs carrying on when the professionals dropped the ball. We're the underdogs, which the British public likes. And we're just a little bit pathetic, which the British public likes too. Gallant no-hopers taking on Goliath, go-getting losers. Especially because we're harmless. It's no co-incidence that news items are called news stories. We like a story, especially given the sort of characters involved, and stories generally have to make sense, unlike actual news events. It fulfils an expectation of neatness. There should be a beginning, middle and end. And then the media fills in the perceived plot holes...

Making Trek because real Trek stopped is such a potent image that it was taken for granted even though, and I can't emphasis this enough, we repeatedly told them otherwise. And here's where we get into decidedly unreal territory because the drive for a news narrative is enough that, in one of the tabloids, they invented quotes. The Guardian told us why: because the tabloids, in addition to picking up out-of-context quotes from online forums and other newspapers, write up stories with fake quotations that are nevertheless something they think he or she might have said. Think about that for a second. It's literally treating real people as characters, and writing them as a journalist's idea of dialogue.

My experience with newspapers has changed my opinion of them forever. Even though it's been a largely fun and positive experience, I now consider myself wiser and warier. And when I see anything in the news, on TV or in newspapers I now always, always consider that what I'm seeing may not be 100% real.

Epistemology pt 2: The Story of Hired Guns

2009-06-09T13:38:00.001Z

I don't think I ever truly liked the name Hired Guns, this being one of DMA Design's Amiga games and one of the key things that I usually get hung up on whenever the subject arises. The history of the project was somewhat troubled from my own perspective, even though I am still stupidly proud of my contribution and occasionally get misty-eyed over it. Troubled, because of what happened after I spent over a year writing the background, story and characters. It was going to be my first published story, really published, really genuinely making me a proper author. This was going to be great! I iz a writer!

    I sent the final copy to Psygnosis, who were demanding it at as soon as possible. They then sat on it for a whole eleven months, before rushing to get the booklet printed by an outside company with only three weeks to go before the release date. At no point did they offer any comment or criticism during that time. And then the game was released and the first chance I had to see myself in print was tearing the cellophane wrapping from the complimentary copy I'd been sent, lifting the lid and leafing through the booklet.
    Where all the punctuation was missing.
    All of it.

    Worse than that, if possible were the instructions for actually playing the game. Scott Johnston, the designer and programmer, had written pages of notes and given them to Psygnosis who were to write the instruction booklet with the purpose of saving time while I fretted away at the background material. Only they'd taken his notes and pasted them in wholesale, entirely unedited.
    My first published story...

    I tend to get protective of Hired Guns these days, to the extent that I imagine that anything I have to say on the subject of the story is definitive by definition. And where this impacts on Wikipedia, the results have been interesting. I never created the Hired Guns entry but I have edited it to incorporate the description of the story, the description of which is simultaneously factually accurate, completely wrong and occupies that strange blurry interface between fact and fiction. So ask what the Hired Guns story is about and the truth gets slightly odd.

    Let's start from the outside, and work our way in.

    On the packaging, the box which contains the disks and the booklets, it describes the characters as fighting “mutants” and since the outside packaging is the one that's most familiar to anyone – and easiest to research - that ought to be definitive. It's there in plain sight after all, and the packaging is not hard to find on the net as a scanned image. For Wikipedian purposes, it's as easy and uncontroversial a citation as you could wish to find.

    But it's flat out wrong.

    Inside the box however there's the manuals (which I wrote – this is my background story after all) and the creatures described therein, which the main characters encounter, are not mutants. They are genetically engineered weapons. It's not just a piffling quibble over semantics either; why this is important is why the characters are there.

    So far it's just a mismatch of info, someone at Psygnosis got it into their heads that it was all about mutants, or perhaps it was even deliberate because “mutants” made for a better soundbite. I'll likely never know. But where it now gets interesting is with Wikipedia's description of the story itself. Within the game itself, the mission centres around the task of locating four nuclear warheads “backpack nukes” and blowing the crap out of the place to kill all the beasties. But this is not what Wikipedia says.   There it tells us that the story is about a hostage rescue which proves to be illusory and is only planted to lure the mercenaries to the planet for a live test of illegal bioengineered weapons. The whole thing is a trap: the planet is a weapons proving ground.
    But none of that appears in the game.

    So how did such an obviously incorrect description get into the Wikipedia entry in the first place? Where is the source for such an outrageous assertion? How did something entirely out of left field come to be parading itself as “fact”? This one is rather easier to track down, because it was me who put it there. So does that mean I'm just proving a well-trodden point about the accuracy of Wikipedia and that the story description is plain invention? An “aha, gotcha” motive made possible by stunt-editing? Well it gets a bit blurrier here too. It really is a genuine description, but of Hired Guns' original plot, before it got hacked to shreds.

    Limitations of memory in the Amiga meant that not everything we'd intended for the game was able to fit in.   As you can guess, it was the story which had to be substantially changed so that it could be described in less memory, with less demands on custom code and graphics; with appropriate amounts of complaining on my part. I'd even written a large diary entry on that day that was decided (it was 12th Feb 1993) and it was fittingly enough pouring with rain, moulding itself snugly around my black mood. Even so, there are still fossilised clues to the original story contained within the games dialogue and within the manual. Hell, some of the dialogue I'd written was there purely to foreshadow the next four games which I'd been sure were in the bag.

    (In fact, as part of the plot I'd even managed to come up with an invention that wasn't realised in the real world until 2007, but that's for another post.)

    I'd written that in Wikipedia with a mixture of devilment and self-righteousness because, at heart, that's what I believe Hired Guns is really about. That was the plot, that was the story I cared about. Indeed in those dark nights alone in my flat at 2am, this wasn't a story I was creating but a true story that I was discovering by being an explorer in some vague space of probability, not a writer. But here's the description from when the entry was created by a user called Imran in 2002 right up to my first edit in 2004:

“The plot is that your band of mercenaries have been picked from intergalactic 'non persons' and wanted criminals, and have been hired to shut down a mutation producing plant on an artificial planet called Graveyard.”

Intergalactic non-persons? Mutation producing plant? Artificial planet??? All that came out of nowhere and is completely wrong. But where it gets interesting for me is that after my correction, no-one has contested it: it is assumed to be the self-correcting mechanism in action. Perhaps it's just a minor game out of the many thousands out there and no-one cares, or perhaps piracy was so rampant that very few possess the physical manuals to fact-check with. Maybe no-one really cares, and if that's the case then what does the truth matter?

    In the end, a fact may be more fluid and nebulous than we'd like. Yet the original story as I described it survived intact for the planning of Hired Guns 2, even to the last-moment addition of an extra planet in the manual. Whatever the finer points of semantics or philosophy, I consider the original story to be the real one. After five games (yes, I was optimistic) the background elements of the story arc would have come to the fore with a huge payoff.
    That resolution, so far, has existed only in my mind. Not on paper.
    And how on Earth could Wikipedia have a citation to that?

Epistemology Pt 1: How I co-founded DMA Design

2009-05-22T18:28:00.000Z

If anyone from DMA is reading this over breakfast, there's probably coffee on the screen by now. But yes, I did co-found DMA, at least according to Wikipedia. I've known about this for a while now and assumed that the fabled self-correcting mechanisms would kick in any moment. After all, anything I've personally contributed seems to have been edited to a crisp within what feels like milliseconds. This is the DMA Design who brought us the classic Lemmings and who were unable to prevent the escape into the wild of Grand Theft Auto. This co-founder isn't merely someone who shares my name either, it's definitely me. And whilst it's true that I was part of DMA from the beginning, I would describe myself more as a hanger-on who eventually got employed than an actual prime-moving founder.

    It also means that I've now got my own opinion on the accuracy issue which hangs around the world's best known wiki like the summer smell from a landfill.

    The entire truth is more nuanced than I can write down here of course. I haven't got any scenes in my own history where myself and Dave Jones – the actual founder – sat around in darkened rooms; plotting and scheming with charts and evil laughter as the plan to bring the world's youth to ruination slowly gelled. (Though I'm sure my memoirs will eventually have a few.) I knew Dave since the computer club days and was doing freelance graphics for him. My entry into DMA was literally:
    “Hey Steve, fancy a job?”
    “Yeah, sure.”

Wikipedia's article on DMA, since morphed into Rockstar North (though not seemingly in spirit) has a reference to MobyGames where my co-foundery was seemingly initiated. They are themselves busy crowdsourcing a catalogue of everyone who's ever worked in the computer games industry, apparently based on the credits in the games themselves. For a while I was even split into two people under Steve and Steven. In my entry there's a small but incomplete list of games with which I had some hand in, but also mysteriously a title which I had nothing to do with, dated 2000 or three years after I left the industry. So far just a mistake, I presume, and normally that's not a big deal. The tax office once mistakenly thought I had two jobs simultaneously and nonsense like that, if they'd known about it, couldn't have helped my case.

    So my developer entry in MobyGames has got it mostly wrong, even though they make no mention of co-founding anything, let alone the one time largest independent developer in Europe. However, the mini-trail at MobyGames ends with the Rockstar North history, not DMA Design, as contributed by a one B.L Stryker and Sciere, of whom I know absolutely nothing although one of them thinks he knew me well enough to call me a co-founder. How he came to believe that about me I cannot say.

    I could update Wikipedia directly, if I felt like it, but I have a possibly old-fashioned bar against writing anything about myself. After all, how do I know I've arrived unless someone else validates it by creating an entry for me? (Dave Jones is possibly the most famous man I know and he warrants a paragraph.) In any case, what could I point to as the source of this fact if someone labels it with the famous [citation needed]? Hey man, I was there, wouldn't appear to cut it since there's nothing for me to point to and say “see?” That is, unless I have my own web page, in which writing it elsewhere provides a valid reference and I'm free to write whatever I like about it. Maybe even this blog entry.

    If I have a consultation with myself about it and then edit Wikipedia, does that fall foul of their tut-tutting against original research? Or could I in fact update the MobyGames entry instead and eventually someone would incorporate that knowledge into Wikipedia. Knowledge which gets copied elsewhere and then cited as true, with the original source as unknown as the source of the Amazon in Victorian times. In either case whatever I happen to say about myself is likely to end up in Wikipedia unchallenged because after a few removes it apparently sheds off the layers of personal bias and becomes definitive.

    Such as, perhaps, the little-known one that I really am a co-founder of DMA Design*.

*In my head.

Microsoft Surface

2009-04-26T12:37:00.001Z

A small handful of Fridays ago, myself and my other half (she's taken to calling me 'other half' on her blog) took a trip through to Edinbrugh for part of this years Science Festival at the University of Edinburgh. Of the two talks which were booked to take place at the intiguingly named department/building Informatics, the first was intended to be the future of computing, but a change in the programme meant the talk was about how the web works.

Most of the subject covered was familiar to me, though the presentation was brightly coloured, fun and definitely for the kids: most lectures on public key cryptography dont, I think, blow up a balloon full of hydrogen to demonstate a one-way function! But I enjoyed myself and got to be a smartarse a number of times by guessing what was going to happen next.

Possibly the highlight, though not until much later when I'd mulled it over, was a practical demonstration of the weirdness of quantum phenomenon. A laser was shone through a set of polarising filters. The weird part is that the light which gets to the other end is brighter going through three filters than it is with two! (An admittedly crude summary.)

As a sort of apology for not being the talk we expected, though not stated that way, the presenter - Chris Bishop of Microsoft Research - had one of the new Surfaces. It's essentially a real world version of the computer display used by Ripley and the rest of the Marines in Aliens, where you can move objects and generally interact with it by touch. (And as seen in countless movies since.)

I managed to get a quick play with it after the talk, jabbing it and making the demonstation picture ripple like water wherever I touched it. Not quite the thrill of pressing down on a schematic of an atmosphere processing facility and declaring that the aliens are getting through the access ducts here, here and here, but pretty cool regardless.

Not that I'll be after one anytime soon, at apparently £7,000. I wonder if they'd loan me one for use as a prop...

Enchanted Picture

2009-02-27T21:54:00.000Z

I haven't posted anything for a while, so here's a photo I took last year on a visit to the Enchanted Forest.

Intrepid Release Day

2009-01-11T10:31:00.001Z

Release day 2007, that is.

Courtesy of Jo, here's a photo taken on the evening on the release of Heavy Lies the Crown. The afternoon was a rather fraught one, spent with Nick grappling with rendering a recalcitrant movie that didn't want to be rendered. A month or so earlier I'd converted all the sequences to Quicktime because my laptop didn't play nice with the MJPEG avis that I'd been using all this time. Rendering took an hour and we were running short of time to make the midnight deadline, inlcuding uploading for Micheal to place them on the servers. David's final theme hadn't arrived, so we agreed to use one of the trailer tracks in its place.

The IM was silent. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. And just as I was about to hit the button for the final output, David popped up with a message saying that the theme was ready to download. Hastily placed in the edit and then an hours rendering, then an hours uploading and four and a half years of effort was at at end.

I felt decidedly odd at that point.

What would everyone think? Would they like it? Would they hate it? So Nick went home and I went for a few drinks with Jo, who took the picture. As far as I know it's the only photo we have from release Day. The hat and TV were added by the camera phone she used.

I'm still not sure what my expression means!

An Intrepid Update

2009-01-10T15:29:00.001Z

This is mostly an Intrepid status update. The Stone Unturned only needs a few pickup shots to be filmed for the shooting to be complete. In the meantime, I'm now officially doing the editing. To that end, I've been piecing it together scene by scene and have now got a rough for the first third of it. It's been going together a lot better than Wheres There's a Sea did, something helped by the fact that there's fewer effects to worry about. And also probably, possibly, because I'm improving as a director. (At least that's what I'd like to think!)

To begin with, way back at the start of this moviemaking thing, I'd only be thinking about whatever scene we'd be filming on the day, with all kinds of practical issues to think about such as the noise the fridge was making and how much of the ironing board would be in shot: filming is easier when it's not in a kitchen.

Paradoxically, it also seems to help when there's less coverage to choose from: one bridge scene in Heavy Lies the Crown saw me ending the day with over thirty takes from ten angles. Now there's fewer (much fewer!) takes but those are chosen better up front. And by up front I mean five minutes in advance.

I'll have to work on that.

We also rehearse a lot more, which reduces the fluffed lines, though not to the extent that the blooper reel can be consigned to history just yet.

The other Intrepid items marked as 'current' in my brain are the Sisters Audio drama and Bit Patterns, which has been on the go for quite some time. Sisters hasn't begun production yet, there being a character issue to sort out. One of them has a lot of backstory and the timeline doesn't quite work out. In any case I promised at the start that I'd write it and then be hands-off, which so far I'm managing to do with an attendand reduction in stress.

My script for Bit Patterns is weighing in at 56 pages and now I've got to figure out how to wrap up the various threads, in addition to completely replacing one character with another. Why I'm doing that is the unexpected unavailability of the actor who was playing him. A character who was right at the heart of the A and the B plot and tying the two halves together.

Well, I guess it's a challenge.

The name Bit Patterns is actually one that I recycled from a novel idea I had back in the nineties, but which never really got further than a couple of pages of notes. The original title for that was The Moiré Effect, and was to have been a story about an AI researcher who dies in an accident. The computer system he was working on is then apparently haunted. Genuine AI? An actual haunting, or is the whole thing some kind of psychological experiment? This was in the day of PCs maxing out at 100 MHz and were still pretty mysterious to the public at large. Not sure how I'd approach it today, since any mysterious message coming through the computer is either email spam, Twitter spam, IM spam, miscellaneous spam or a phishing scam.

Bit Patterns for Intrepid is an entirely different story. All that's made it online so far is that it involves two long range probes which vanished in mysterious circumstances and that - again - it proves that the Merchant Service and Starfleet are best when they work together. I think I've also managed to get in some proper scientific terminology and methodology, something I feel strongly about given that I list astronomy amongst my nerdish passions. (There was a TV mini-series a few years ago called Supernova which kicked off with some of the most stupid nonsensical "scientific" dialogue I'd ever heard in something intended to be serious.)

Also there's characters and a story. Important to include that stuff.

Further updates as events warrant!

Twitter

2008-12-29T09:49:00.003Z

Well, according to Twitter Grader I am now ranked 777,641 out of 806,421 with a grade of 3 out of a possible 100. Some improvement possibly needed. Like me actually using it, one would presume.

Naming those Pesky Flying UFO Objects

2008-12-13T11:45:00.003Z

One of my guilty pleasures is an interest in the whole flying saucer malarkey business. Equally, it's also something which annoys me intensely. The whole subject seems to have gone off the boil (to regurgitate a phrase) in recent years, with only a fairly recent pick-up.

Not much has been happening (and to the hardcore skeptic, never happened in the first place) until the last year or so. I find this Interesting, because of the fascinating history which I think was kicked off for me with a Swap Shop special in 1976. I find this annoying because the bar for explanations seems to have been set so low; i.e. anything slightly odd couldn't possibly be anything other than aliens.

Anything can indeed be pressed into use as a UFO, which itself is an indictment of the terminology used. “UFO” was created in, I believe, 1955 by a USAF Captain, Edward J Ruppelt. The U in UFO means unidentified, not that the sum entirety of the public has any truck with such technicalities. UFO equals aliens. Last year's release of the MOD's Condign Report made a point of describing reports as UAPs - Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomenon. UFO has become too broad a brush.

So, sitting on a bus one day, which can sometimes be great for thinking off at tangents, I realised that if there were really any solid mysterious craft buzzing around in the air – as opposed to misidentified sightings of the Moon, plastic bags floating in the air and so on, they'd need a different categorisation. Taking a leaf from the book of monster hunters (yeah, yeah, I know) who describe their field as cryptozoology – crypto means hidden after all – a hidden craft would have to be a crypto something.

And this is where the freeform thinking on a bus comes into its own, because I'm rather fond of the old-fashioned names for certain classes of aircraft. An aerodyne is a normal aircraft, a gyrodyne is a particular kind of helicopter and so on.

So I thought an excellent name for nuts and bolts mysterious craft in our skies, both stealth fighters and – hey, alien spaceships why not? - would be Cryptodynes.

Feel free to spread the word. (Yeah, right!)

Hammond's Law

2008-11-17T22:11:00.001Z

So, at the Iain Banks talk, I was originally going to suggest one of the 'laws' that might be appropriate, but then decided that I was going to keep it to myself; thought I think it rather fits in with the spirit of the Culture. So much so, that I might have subconsciously absorbed something like it from his novels. Anyway, Hammond's First Law – and the associated arrogance which goes along with it – is this: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is an insufficient hoot”.

Sounds like something a Mind would say.

Silicon Heaven

2008-11-11T20:57:00.003Z

Slightly sad news, as far as I'm concerned, this weekend when my old laptop - an HP DV1588 - finally ended up in Silicon Heaven. The noteworthy (if you choose to take it that way) part of all this is that it's the machine on which I put together Heavy Lies the Crown, editing a substantial chunk of the movie on it, doing most of the compositing and rendering a number of CG effects. I bought it after my old Desktop had gone the same way, picking it purely on the basis that it had enough spec to let me finish the film. It even appeared in a couple of TV news items with me, where I pretended I was editing on the spot for the camera crews.

Why do I get so fond of these things?

Lemmings II

2008-11-05T21:42:00.002Z

Via Mike at Life of a Games Programmer, I present the end sequence for Lemmings II, which has my name in it! The reason for this is that I designed some levels for it. Wow, I haven't seen this since sometime late last century!

Spooks Series 7: Episode 2

2008-11-05T21:18:00.001Z

It's a terrible burden actually knowing stuff. At least that's how the writer of this episode must feel. There is a certain cuteness, it must be said, when the mainstream media tries to do technology, like a puppy trying to join in a game of football. It'll make you go 'aw' but what you really care about is the team.

Strained analogy. Sorry.

The episode had a distributed denial of service attack on the UK, carried out by a submarine tapping an underwater cable. Which is, er, a single location. The 'distributed' part of it was obviously merrily sidelined in favour of - gasp! - a big dangerous looking thing!

So of course the defence against this is to launch a 'zero day attack'.

Oh dear.

A zero day attack is making use of an undisclosed computer vulnerability, i.e. zero days have gone by since it was discovered and hence no defence is in place.

I actually laughed out loud when I heard this. Politics and police procedures are carefully researched for that added authenticity, of course, but as soon as technology is involved, any old shit is made up. In this case by someone who has heard the phrases but has clearly no idea what they mean.

And just for good measure, the zero day attack is also a virus. Because as far as TV people are concerned, computer viruses can do anything. Perhaps it should have been named the MacGuffin virus?

This kind of thing, being a flagship BBC program, should be beneath them; it turned the normally excellent Spooks into a cartoon.

Banks' Law

2008-11-01T16:45:00.001Z

Back at the Edinburgh book festival, which I claimed I was going to write more about, we saw Iain Banks at one of the big events. Iain, of Culture novels fame – was giving a talk essentially about being Iain Banks, followed by a book signing. The whole thing was something I was intending to blog about immediately afterwards in the pub, as I'd done the day before, but a rather nasty headache overtook me and so the on-the-spot blathering was quietly dropped. Overall, though, I do believe I have added to the Banks' canon.

So here's how I remember it.

We turned up early, to the point of being first in the queue. In no way are either of us a fanboy or fangirl respectively. Given that it was SF, does that make us fanbeings? In any case, we were first in the door and by happy chance none of the front row seats were reserved, which is how we came to be right in front of him, a mere smattering of feet away.

(I'm really racking my mind to think what was said, the danger of waiting a few months to note things down. As opposed to my memories of the computer games industry, where the notes have waited something like sixteen years.)

Anyway, the important thing happened afterwards at the signing. Lesley had given me Matter and I was dithering about whether I was wanting it signed, meaning that I worried whether I would be too star-struck to form sentences in front of the great man. Lesley contrived to escape from the signing queue, the better vantage point from which to watch everyone smile and nod and say their names and then Iain's autograph would be jotted down.

Most people brought a single novel; Matter was a clear favourite, being newly released. One or two brought a whole pile of books and the guy in front of us had a Kindle. The mystery of how he was going to get an electronic book signed was resolved when he also had a normal book. A Book, book. Someone asked for Iain to write “something inspirational” to which his response was “Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

I think we can all live with that.

But then it was my turn and in a sudden fit of inspiration I asked for his full Culture name! In the Culture, you see, your full name also includes your planet and star system of birth. Emboldened, I managed to mumble out the question that I'd been too chicken to ask in the talk itself. Given that Arthur C Clarke has a law and Asimov has his laws of robotics, does Iain Banks have his own law?

I was amazed that he only needed a second or two to think this over and come up with a clear answer on the spot, though as he said, laughing, it was still a first draft.

“Any worldview, indistinguishable from solipsism, is wrong.”

I left happy. The remainder of the evening involved the train back and watching a massive glow in the sky from what was apparently a fire at a chemical plant. But that's another story.

The Satellite Dish

2008-09-18T20:14:00.000Z

As a follow up on my delivery of a satellite dish (and a stand), you can see (in a metaphysical way since I didn't add a photo) that it's a bit larger than I imagined. The 60cm wasn't in stock and I was impatient, so I went for the 90cm one. It blocks out the Sun and resonates quite spectacularly when bellowing out some rebuke to the television; it makes me sound like a radio FX. The rebukes to the TV, incidentally, tend to be to the effect that the content is risible and its inventors were fools. (i.e. not enough Battlestar Galactica.)

DMA Design Office Tour

2008-09-04T21:11:00.007Z

Well, the poll has spoken. Out of the (did I break double figures?) responses came a clear preference for the old computer game days. I think it was just before Christmas 1992 that I took my new video camera into the office and asked Andolf (Graeme Anderson) to be the presenter. You can see me in my Halo Jones T-Shirt somewhere in the middle of it. My desk is surrounded with bits of paper containing Hired Guns material. Right at the end, you can see a very disdainful Mike Dailly, which has a certain level of irony since I gave him a copy of this a couple of years ago and he bloody posts it to YouTube without asking!!!!

I had this half-assed notion that I'd gather together every possible bit of video relating to DMA and make it into a documentary. I have the DMA fireworks display, the Lemming we made out of snow in the car park, and a dozen b/w frames from an episode of Working Lunch which featured us sometime in 1996. Much other stuff as well, including the big boss Dave Jones telling a sweary anecdote! (Which Mike also uploaded without asking! Bah, at least I still have the pudding eating competition on video. You don't have that on tape Mikey boy, do ya!)

Still, a documentary about DMA? Who'd be interested in such a thing? :)

Cardiff

2008-09-04T20:50:00.000Z

I was actually in cardiff back in Jan, but since I haven't posted anything recently, here's a picture of the mysterious "Dr Horizon".

Intrepid: Sisters

2008-08-20T20:26:00.003Z

Last night I put the final polish to the audio script for Sisters, something which I'd been meaning to do for the last week. Originally this was a short story of mine which I'd thought of as being akin to Intrepid fanfic, written while Heavy Lies the Crown was yet to be released and not really 'official'. So it was nice to see elements from it being incorporated into the proper background. That made it the real thing for me.

Micheal Hudson thought it would make a good audio drama and made an attempt to convert it, before realising that it might not be that straightforward. Almost the entire thing was either some visual imagery or else internal character thoughts; not something lending itself to audio very easily.

So I've been rewriting it, in some places quite substantially, to fit the new form. A narrator has been added for some of the exposition, while the remainder has been changed into dialogue divided between the characters. In some cases, new characters. It was an interesting experiment and now that it's in Micheal's hands I've promised to be hands-off while he gets it made.

That last part might be tricky - I can't help wanting to do everything!

Edinburgh Book Festival

2008-08-11T15:30:00.001Z

The Edinburgh book festival is now in full flow and I've just been along with Lesley to see Richard Dawkins (famous scientist) give a talk. All was going pretty much as expected, arrive early, see huge queue, guy with new iPhone (non-famous member of public) behind us, start going into the tent where the talk was being held. We found a seat and sat down. No problem, until this proved to be the very wrong seat indeed when Lesley spotted Iain Banks (famous author) having walked in as part of the audience.

The wrong seat, of course, was any seat that was not immediately adjacent to Iain Banks (famous Scottish author). Lesley happens to like Iain Banks (famous and clever Scottish author) a lot. So that was why the minutes leading up to Dawkin's talk consisted of observations of the form "Iain's taking his coat off", "Iain's looking around" and "Iain's looking at me!!!" (Disclaimer: Lesley is normally very *non-starstruck* and independent.)

The talk proved to be an interview chaired by Paula Kirby (famous, er, non-famous? I really have no idea) who started off by telling us that we'd be going into some less-travelled questioning. Most of the questioning stemmed from Richard's views on aliens, which itself came from an earlier debate in which he'd been consistently misrepresented. Even though it was outside his normal area of expertise, he spoke lucidly and at one point I wondered what must have been going through Iain Banks mind (famous clever Scottish Science Fiction author) as Richard explained that any real aliens would be vastly different in form to the old humanoid shape. Most science fiction writers don't have their aliens as being anything other than humanoid.

I wonder if Richard has read The Algebraist... but then Iain is most definitely not most science fiction writers. (Iain's giving his own talk on Wednesday, I'll have to ask him his thoughts - if I'm brave enough.) Dawkins is not most science fiction writers either; he revealed that his own story about aliens on the moon didn't follow the usual SF convention of having them speak English - the spoke French. But then he was seven at the time.

Most of the rest of the talk continued in on this theme, with a discussion of the Earth as a likely place for life and of multiverses. It was an unexpected avenue, and something which I am more familiar with than I would have been with biology. Of course it was all discussed with reference to scientific explanation versus "God did it", the result being entirely fascinating, even mentioning Fermi's Paradox. At that point I couldn't help thinking how amazing a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Baxter (another famous science fiction author) might have been.

Myself and Lesley were half expecting Iain to ask a question during the subsequent Q&A, but he remained silent. I thought that the questions from the audience were rather more interesting (and of course wider ranging) that Paula's questions, which really just stuck to the same theme.

So I'm blogging this from a pub a few streets down from the book festival and there's a lot of events still to go this week, including one about blogging.

Doritos in Space

2008-08-08T14:02:00.002Z

(I wrote a first draft of this a while back and then promptly forgot about it. I was reminded of it by a BBC news item of something similar. I'll get to that in a later entry.)

The notion of using space for advertising isn't a new one. The Last Action Hero was briefly featured on the side of a NASA rocket launch, Pepsi was launched to Mir and Pizza Hut was on A Proton launch vehicle, amongst others. But with the latest ad effort, one has lurched into the entirely sinister.

Soon after NASA broadcast a Beatles song deep into space with a radio telescope, an advert for Doritos was broadcast in the same way. As far as any potential inhabitants of 47 Ursa Majoris are concerned, the first contact with humanity will be spam. Not content to merely pollute our own airwaves, we're exporting our pollution as far as we can possibly throw it across the universe. How noble.

Spamming would be grounds for an invasion all by itself, by any presumed civilisation. But then that is not the larger point that is being made. The very basic fact is that we have been making ourselves visible for some time now, but now we are doing it deliberately. As has been pointed out elsewhere on the net, were exposing ourselves to a something whose capabilities and intentions are unknown.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. Even if the chances of the broadcast actually being picked up are vanishingly small, the potential consequences are immense. For example an event, such as a large asteroid hitting us, is unlikely but the result is catastrophic. Our Doritos advert has an even smaller chance of any consequences, but those consequences could be vastly greater.

We're conditioned by fiction to think of aliens as spanning the whole range of possible psychologies. Klingons are warriors who hold honour above all else, for a well-known example. But almost the entirety of alien depictions are variations of humans in one way or another. A truly alien psychology may act in ways we could barely comprehend. List all the SF battles between humans and aliens and the two sides are essentially pretty well matched. Any real encounter would have no such luxury.

In Stranger in a Strange Land, the Martians debate the artistic necessity of destroying Earth. Extraordinary. Yet in real human culture we have behaviours which are far stranger. Draw a cartoon with a particular subject matter and a sizeable section of humanity will call for your execution. And it hardly need be pointed out that after only a hundred years of technological progress we can destroy ourselves quite thoroughly. What can another civilisation do with a thousand years head start? Or ten thousand?

To reiterate; we are making ourselves known to possible aliens who may react in ways which cannot be known in advance. Whose intentions perhaps can't be known even in principle. Truly, we have no idea what we might be messing with.

They may think an interstellar Doritos advert to be funny. They may think it is the sign of an appallingly immature civilisation. Or they may merely see that a new technological culture has arisen – and move to eliminate it before it can become a threat. Or - and how humiliating this would be - we join the greater galactic community but are forever after treated as a joke, a third rate culture, because our first detectable broadcast was not about art or science or any of the things we supposedly hold to be important, but about crisps.

We can't know. And given the limitations of the speed of light, we won't know, though future generations may. Carl Sagan once asked who speaks for Earth. Well now we know the answer: a marketing executive.

Deliveries

2008-07-18T07:03:00.002Z

So, not unusually I'm waiting on something I've bought to arrive. Seems straightforward enough; order, select next day delivery, pay a little extra for the 'delivered before 10am' option. I hate waiting, you see.

So I get the dispatch confirmation from the shop by email, which gives me the tracking number. Which tells me to allow until 12 midday before the tracking will start working. Midday. On a delivery before 10. (Or perhaps 10:30. The shop and the delivery company don't agree on this.)

Sure enough the web tracking system of the delivery company has 'no information'. So my stuff is theoretically anywhere.

Back to that same email, which at the bottom tells me to allow five working days.

The noise you hear is me sighing.

Where there's a Sea...

2008-07-17T08:34:00.001Z

This weekend is allegedly the release date for the short episode "Where's there's a Sea...", which I've been working on all week putting it together. At the moment there's a few items which the CG guys are working on, which I'll drop into the edit once they're finished. One shot that I don'thave to wait on (aside from rendering) is this still from the opening animation, which is my own contribution to the CG. Given that we've got a lot of talent willing to help these days, it's not likely that there's a need for me to do much CG anymore. This may very well be my last CG contribution.

Kid Kirby

2008-06-14T12:32:00.001Z

I've just been doing some (rare) tidying of the house and an come across the legal disclaimer that I wrote for the Kid Kirby manual. Kid Kirby was a platform game that DMA were doing for Nintendo, before it unfortunately got canned at the eleventh hour. Here's what I wrote:

Disclaimer: Nintendo of America is utterly nuke-proof when it comes to legal matters. We employ a device called a High Energy Attorneytron which emits powerful Anti-Lawsuitino particles. Thus it is guaranteed by the very underlying physics of the universe that we live in, that you shall not at any point - no matter how many dimensions you occupy - have any claim against Nintendo of America. Not even if a direct causal connection can be established between this Game Pak and a high incidence of newly discovered comets striking your property. By glancing at this Instruction Booklet, you have agreed to the conditions laid down therein. Resistance is futile.

Somehow I don't think they would have went for it.

Update:
Found another one, this time intended to go at the front of the manual.

Purchase of this Game Pak implies the acceptance of the following conditions: Nintendo of America reserves the right to come into your room at night and shine bright lights in your face.

I don't think that would have got past them either.

The Stone Unturned: Friday's Shoot

2008-05-24T08:36:00.007Z

Friday was when I realised that my fifteen minutes had expired. Nick had invited the Courier to come and have a good old look around our filming efforts, and just shortly after I'd been given a lift to the Abbey Theatre, a reporter and photographer arrived. I was prepared for this, of course, feeling as I did that I was something of a veteran after 2006's little publicity epidemic. (And some of 2007 too). With CNN, the BBC, ZDF all having interviewed myself and Nick for television and a number of newspaper articles appearing at the same time, it was almost routine. (I keep all the newspaper articles in a special shrine where I go to in times of feeling sorry for myself.*)

So I made certain that along with the other camera, the script, a pen, two pounds fifty pence, chocolate, a handheld GPS (don't ask) and a thing that glows in the dark for no reason, I'd also packed my World's Greatest Director baseball cap. Nick and Lucie had brought me this back from Las vegas and it is most treasured, because it reminds me of what I'm supposed to be up to when I attend these things. So, just the same as last time, then.

Nope.

It bodes well for Stone Unturned that Giles in uniform is such a draw, and having all the guys in uniform – especially one who looks like that captain bloke in the Next Generation – made for an irresistible image. Not many pictures are as eye-catching as a bunch of Trekkies poised in combat against a hasty assembly of council workers, somehow discovered spraying the paths and shanghaied in the photo-op.

But no matter how much I tugged at my cap and made pitiful mewling sounds, no-one appeared to think that I was a fit subject to appear in the article, or indeed notice. “My blog shall hear of this!” I declared to the surrounds, but to no avail. And no time to set the iPod to the “sorry for myself” playlist.

A surprisingly melancholic moment, then.

Most of Friday's scenes were set on the Intrepid Bridge, the ones that weren't probably constitutes a spoiler alert, and were shot against the greenscreen. One of the 'key' advantages (he he, I just made a digital compositing joke) of using the Abbey Theatre in Abroath is the amount of space available to put up things like greenscreen, at least in comparison with the kitchen which has slightly less than sound-stage status and is full of teapots, irons and other miscellany. We set a small record for ourselves with the amount of material draped at the back of the set.

This is good. Up until now, in Intrepid, I've been using what are called locked-off shots. In other words, the camera doesn't move when it's rolling and any scenes are made by getting another take from a different angle and cutting between them. It works pretty well, though it doesn't stack up well to the modern TV filming method of moving the camera around constantly. In our case it's been through sheer pragmatism. Steve Pasqua over the years has constantly tried to get me to pan the camera, which would be fine if I thought our tripod was up to doing it smoothly. Worse yet, we don't have the technology to move the camera against the greenscreen, since for example the 3D bridge model would have to match the motion and we can't do that... yet. Locking off the shots also means that the limited space in the kitchen can be used effectively.

You'll see some more adventurous camerawork soon, though, be sure of it!

So back in the theatre, we've enough space that – even though I'm not doing pans yet – Giles is able to walk from one side of the bridge to the other! Sounds like a minor thing, but it makes a tremendous difference. In fact there were numerous improvements over our last greenscreen shoot. Ric Forster helpfully arranged the lighting, for example, and we had enough room to illuminate the greenscreen without too many shadows. In fact everything that went smoothly seemed to be down to the extra space. When shooting a side angle on the bridge, where Caed's station is located, all we needed to do was rotate the set around ninety degrees. And since the set was a chair and a rear console, this didn't take long at all.

I can't remember the time that we got finished, sometime late in the evening. All I can remember is that I was too tired to get fish and chips. And when you're in Arbroath, that's pretty tired.

*Actually, I can't remember where I've put them.

The Stone Unturned

2008-05-19T18:47:00.007Z

I was viciously attacked by a tick a couple of Saturdays ago when I was doing the “Mr Big Shot Director” thing again. Against all common sense,I was lying down in the grass trying to get a good dramatic (too melodramatic!) angle on a couple of the actors. That the grass was above a cave entrance and I have a fear of heights too, meant that I wasn't really doing myself any favours that weekend.

The Stone Unturned is an Intrepid script by Brian Matthews, that despite the gratuitous and unnecessary use of the word 'intergalactic', managed to combine a good old adventure story with the return of an old character from TNG. Naturally, you'd have to pay a negative amount of attention not to notice that it was in fact a certain Picard, played by Giles Aston. Coverage of the event appeared in the Dundee Courier as well as the slightly more widely viewed BBC website.

My task over the weekend was to direct the scenes with Giles in them, as we had a limited amount of time while he was in Dundee. This led to the most intensively scheduled shooting of anything we've done so far. I'll describe the three days in separate posts when I have the chance, but the important thing to note here is that we got the shots we needed and I managed not to lose it to any significant degree.

Shooting the scenes took us to many exotic locales; the magnificent hills outside Dunkeld, the ancient city of Arbroath and Nick's Kitchen. Or perhaps that should be Lucie's Kitchen, depending on which one of them actually prepares the most meals.

“Mr Big Shot Director” is what my girlfriend called me just before we started. I'm almost certain there was no sarcasm involved.

Grand Theft Auto - Remembered

2008-04-17T20:31:00.008Z

Today, on the way to work, I saw a special collector's edition of a magazine in the newsagents and just had to buy it. It was a retrospective of ten years to celebrate GTA, marking the release of GTA IV. So far, nothing odd about that, except that I haven't played GTA and haven't actually played much of anything in the last ten years. So why did I consider it a must buy?

Nostalgia.

You see I was, in a minor way, involved in the creation of the original GTA from DMA Design. It was created there in the last few years of my time at DMA, where I worked on stories and manuals and stuff like that. This was late 1996, early 1997 and through a combination of opportunity and circumstance, I was going freelance the next summer.

Meanwhile I was writing the story for Body Harvest and trying to keep both hands on the keyboard instead of one of the keyboard and the other one with a fistful of my recently removed hair. Some of the decisions about the story that were being imposed on me from Nintendo were, frankly, barking as well as contradictory. Long story. So it was a relief to be asked by Gary Penn to write some dialogue for GTA.

My task was the write some "mission briefings" which were to appear on the pagers within the game, something which was quite refreshing, being completely non-science fiction. So in the relative "quiet" of my home, I cranked up the unreliable WordPro and wrote. This went on and off for several months, during which all kinds of pop-culture seemed to make its way into the pager messages, all of it at an entirely subconscious level. Trainspotting was big at the time and I somehow managed to name a character Renton, despite not actually seeing the film for another five years!

I cringe to imagine what Gary thought when he saw that apparent lack of imagination, though I suppose I could have spun it as a currently hip pop-culture reference. None of that mattered, because what actually happened was that I nervously presented the printout of the dialogue so far and Gary read. And read. And read.

"Very entertaining" he concluded, "but they're way too big to fit on a pager."

Slam!

Development of GTA continued past my time at DMA and as far as I know, none of my dialogue was included; certainly not any of my characters. I've still got the files and have spent some time going over it and wondering at the amount of swearing I included in it.

Still, that's GTA for you. Dangerous to know!

P.S.

Incidentally, my own games entry is here. The information there is not entirely accurate.

No More Intrepid Blog

2008-04-11T07:57:00.001Z

Well it looks as though this is going to be my only blog now. I used to have one at the Intrepid site, but the forum feature which allowed it is no longer a paying proposition and Nick isn't going to renew it. All of which makes life a little easier for me, since I never knew which blog I ought to post stuff in, or whether to duplicate content in the two of them or what.

All of the Intrepid bloggers have some time before it's shut down, so I'll probably start moving my stuff to here which gives me lots of material at no effort to me!

Come for the Cave, Stay for the Dead Whale

2008-04-01T20:42:00.001Z

We were doing some location scouting on Sunday. Part of an upcoming Intrepid story takes place in a cave, and since the caves are supposed to be on a different planet from the last lot of caves we filmed in, they needed to look different. For the episode called Transitions and Lamentations, the cave was really a some rocks which had collapsed together leaving large gaps. It looked the part though and started to flood as the day wore on. We got the shots though. So just in case that wasn't traumatic enough, the caves we went to have a look at this time were Arbroath. Just outside Arbroath in fact. Right next to the sea.

These were caves in which flooding would be an understatement, and as it happened we narrowly avoided being cut off by the rising tide. Not that there was any real danger, since we could have toughed it out halfway up a hill but only once of us had brought any food and I hate cheese...

By that time it had started to pour with rain as well.

A much better overview could be found via the clifftop path, which was vantage point enough to sea some more impressive caves and also a beached and entirely dead whale on the beach below. I managed to get a few photos on maximum zoom, but we weren't able to get closer. The path was purely around the edge of the cliff and the only reasonable route to it involved navigating what looked like the output of a sewer, so we gave up the idea.

As it turns out, the whale had already been reported. As far as I can tell, it was a Minke whale, which is the only common one around Scotland.

Nice though the caves were, we're not convinced they'd be easy to film with. Tides aside, they're difficult to get to and that was just us lot without any gear.

We'll keep on looking.

Arthur C Clarke

2008-03-19T20:13:00.002Z

A couple of weeks ago at a party, in the midst of a conversation about the divide between sports and science, I said "Every true geek can remember where he was when Isaac Asimov died." One of the guests thought he was still alive, but further questioning proved that he was actually thinking of Arthur C Clarke. Asimov had been gone since 1992 and despite my proclamation, I don't actually remember where I was when I heard the news; I only remember a vague impression of writing down how I felt. Last night, of course, was different.

Unfortunately, I actually did get to know where I was and what I was doing when I found out Clarke had died. Even though we had all acknowledged that he was pretty old, it never occurred to me that he wouldn't go on forever. I was online on the Intrepid forum, arguing about the correct length of phaser beams in Star Trek, and then suddenly there was a new thread started with breaking news...

In my last post I wrote that Islands in the Sky was one of the first Clarke books that I had read, but it wasn't the one that made the most impression. Even for a techie like myself, who loved the sheer plausible, accurate detail in his short stories, it was the imagery that sold it. No other writer could convey such a sense of awe. And for all that his style was functional, and his love of technology perhaps offputting to those who couldn't appreciate the inherent cleverness of the stories, there was just enough sprinkling of poetry to require carefully putting the book down for a few minutes to savour it.

One image that has stayed with me for years is from The Songs of Distant Earth, when the colony ship ignites its drive system on the opposite side of the world and the whole of the horizon lights up. The colonists are departing, and because this is proper science fiction with the emphasis on science, of relativistic time dilation, we have a full, deep, understanding of what it means; there is no possibility of return. None.

Two groups of people who can never again meet.

And its this fusion of enormous concepts with a very human dimension which shows Clarke at his finest. I have some of his books on my bookcase right now.

I think I should do some reading.

I'm not in SciFiNow!!!

2008-02-02T18:26:00.000Z

Well, fame was almost mine. I'd been wondering for years if SFX would even pick up on this little movie that we were doing. OK, so I could have got in touch with them at any point, but that would have been a little presumptuous. (Also they might have laughed and that wouldn't have done me any good!) I'd kind of had a long-standing ambition to get the remake of Hired Guns in there as the best SF game of the year, but that didn't happen... So now there's SciFiNow having joined the ranks of SF magazines for almost a year now and, hey, there was a request for an interview! With Nick.

Ah.

So I somehow convinced them to include myself by going something like “Me! Me! Me!” and so that was how I came to be writing a bunch of interview answers. And as happens with these things, the whole lot was compressed and edited down to the point where, as you can see in SciFiNow issue 11, my contribution is entirely invisible. Well, apart from a few photos of mine which were credited under “copyright of their respective owners” and one that I'm actually in, (On the hillside in the distance!)

So rather than let them go to waste, I've included them here. Interview questions are copyright of their respective owners...

How did you get into Star Trek and science fiction in the first place?

The first written science fiction I can remember reading were the Scott Saunders adventures by Patrick Moore and collection of Star Trek episodes in short story form, which utterly failed to capture the spirit of it. Star Trek itself wasn't anything I really 'got into' as such, it was just always an ambient part of the 1970s background when I was growing up, along with Space 1999 and the Gemini Man. I recall first watching TOS on my 4" black and white TV. If there was a moment when I suddenly knew this kind of stuff was important, it was missing the pilot episode of Space 1999 and everyone else in the playground was talking about it! Mainly though, it was written fiction that held my imagination from an early age, such as Arthur C Clarkes Islands in the Sky and a collection of Asimov stories that I found in my Dad's cupboard. I think it wasn't until maybe the third season of TNG that I really counted myself as a Star Trek fan. It's funny that now I'm older I have much more of an appreciation for the original series.

What made you decide to create your own series?

It wasn't my idea in the first place, but I managed to secure a place when we were still at the "wouldn't his be cool" stage by having a fairly modern digital video camera. I wasn't aware of other Star Trek fan films at that point, though I knew of Troops which I very much liked. I had no idea it was possible for a bunch of fans to make something, and it seemed like a fun notion for us to do it because our fan club's turnout was dwindling and we wanted some endeavor that kept the core group socialising.

Originally we'd never planned to make an episode, we were making a short film, and for a long time the format seemed to be fairly fluid. In fact I will still use the phrase 'movie' and 'full length episode' interchangeably. By the time it had solidified, it was effectively a pilot episode.

What’s typically involved in the production of an installment?

I don't think there's anything that's 'typical' about it, since we've changed a lot of things for the new shorts that we're making, based on the experience gained. Nick is always telling me to shoot less takes and I'm always telling him that I want to shoot more takes! I personally love the look of the CG bridge which we placed against greenscreen, but I still have nightmares about the amount of keying I had to do night after night. So one of the changes is that we're trying to shoot against physical sets as much as possible.

What equipment do you use for photography and post production?

It's pretty much off the shelf stuff that you could get in the high-street. We've got some higher-end cameras and mikes now, but the first episode was filmed entirely on my Sony Handycam (a TR330) which I'd fortunately bought a little while before the whole idea for the movie came along. I edited and assembled the whole thing on an HP Pavilion laptop using Adobe Premiere. Most of the special effects were created in LightWave by our CG guys and any digital sets were created in Cinema 4D. I still find it amazing that in principle it's possible to go on the net with a credit card and two days later you've got everything you need to make a movie!

Where do you tend to shoot, and do you have permanent sets like Star Trek Exeter?

We have permanent bits of sets, though some of the panels are looking like they need an overhaul! Most of the original movie is shot against greenscreen in Nick and Lucy's spare room, with some of the later material shot in the kitchen.

Given your experience of making fan series, do you have any advice for anybody thinking of starting their own?

Prepare for anguish. As we discovered, doing this was a lot of work and we experienced a lot of setbacks. Make sure that your cast and crew are people who'll go the distance. Way back at the beginning we were nearly scupped by an actor who decided to quit after his first scene had been filmed - to this day he has not bothered to inform me of his decision.

And so there you have it!

Bob Exists

2008-01-30T22:50:00.000Z

As of about 7pm a couple of Sundays ago, I had no idea that Bob even existed. Bob is a third cousin of mine, assuming I understand the arcane nomenclature of genealogists. I'd always assumed that third cousin, twice removed, was the kind of description that only had a reality in friend-of-a-friend stories. You know, the ones where a friend's cousin's barber's parrot's personal trainer had seen a ghost pirate carjack a hummer and drive it upside down into a river. i.e. possibly a tad more fiction than hard nosed fact. But Bob is a real person, living in the USA, and was a topic of family discussion because no-one had heard from him in twelve years. Not that he was missing, exactly, just that no-one on this side of the Atlantic had any idea where he was or any means to get in touch.

As was being told this, I slowly got more interested in the possibility of locating him through a generous application of internet magic. Up until now the search had been based via the Salvation Army, an approach which had depended on knowing his exact date of birth; information which wasn't available. I convinced myself that I was the guy to save the day and in my head I began to plan my approach.

Evidence existed in the form of a photocopied letter from his wife, printed in 1996, and describing the usual family matters which included plans to go on a Mediterranean cruise. It was a puzzle to be unlocked, which I thought I might morbidly tackle by first looking at shipping disasters. (After the obligatory Google search, of which a current example meme seems to be “Where are my damn keys”. We'll have to wait until 2015 for that one.) A border around the letter struck me as reminiscent of a template once used by the desktop publishing software Quark Xpress. A line of enquiry would then be to ask if anyone of that name had registered it. From then on, my thoughts got more elaborate and since I had no net access at that point, nothing existed to attenuate my growing enthusiasm.

I had no idea how Google Earth could help find a missing person, but I added it to my list anyway as well as the thrilling thought of calling the FBI to ask their assistance. Which was around the point that the phone rang.

It's my cousin Anne, who (having heard the tale last week) was calling with the news that she'd popped his daughter's name into Facebook and was swapping emails with her right now. Bob, she said, was alive and kicking and doing OK.

Well, after twelve years, at least I had the honour of being part of the search for the last thirty minutes.

Where there's a Sea

2007-11-18T13:15:00.000Z

I'm aware that when I write about the Intrepid moviemaking, I've leapt straight in with no preamble. Unless you've checked the links below, you'll probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Where there's a Sea is a short Star Trek fan film which myself and some friends are making as a follow up to Heavy Lies the Crown which we released back in January. Our new one is the first outing for a new (ish) camera and a chance to put into practice everything that we have supposedly learnt over the last few years. A few weeks ago we shot the last of the footage needed to piece the thing together. Last night I got the footage from Nick (writer, producer) on an external hard drive and got it into the computer. I now face the unpleasant prospect of looking at myself for a few months, since for a change I was in front of the camera, and now I'm editing it all together. I swear I will not try to make myself look good at the expense of everyone else!

NaNoWriMo Crash and Burn

2007-11-04T20:21:00.001Z

Well, so much for all the planning. By some horrible co-incidence on Thursday, the very first day of the eagerly anticipated competition to write a novel in a month, my laptop decided that it'd had enough. Pausing for a half-minute and then a minute between coming out of standby and doing anything useful had now got a little worse. A minute became two minutes and then on Thu, indefinitely. So of course I blamed windows and got as far as wiping the whole lot before discovering that it was a hardware problem that could be fixed by, um, taking the laptop in both hands and flexing it slightly.
No, I don't understand that either.
In any case, this has had two effects. One is that in a fit of pique, I installed Ubuntu (very nice by the way) and the other is that I have abandoned NaNoWriMo for this year since as I write this I'm about 5000 words down before I've even started. Watching telly has never seemed so appealing this weekend.

More Rumbly Writings

2007-10-29T19:57:00.001Z

I'll do better this time... Last year I entered the National Novel Writing Month competition and managed to rack up 19000 words or so before the deadline expired. Since that was a little short of 50000, it was a fail. On the other hand I've rarely had so much fun committing words to paper. I've decided to continue on the same novel as before, only this will be a fresh 50000 to add to the existing ones. After all, I seem to have a problem beginning writing and then seeing it through. Last year was also a tad problematical in that I was supposed to be doing a lot of other stuff. Actually, the same applies this time, but I don't feel so guilty! I was planning on writing, just not writing something else.

Elsewhere, I'm halfway through the first draft of a script which will hopefully become Intrepid's second full-length episode. It's been referred to on the official wiki for some time now, but it's only in the last few months that I've started working on it in earnest. (For various values of 'earnest').

What is Science Fiction Anymore?

2007-10-20T10:02:00.001Z

Nobody seems to know anymore. A recent poll conducted by the BBC drew much comment on our own forums, because of the twenty or so favourite SF shows (as voted for by the public), it seemed to us that just a little over half of them were actually SF. Admittedly, there seemed to be a sliding scale of 'SF-ness' with the usual suspects of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica flying the SF colours, then shows with a strong flavouring of SF and then... hold on a second. A sliding scale of SF-ness? If the poll was to be believed, the public – astoundingly - considers Twin Peaks to be Science Fiction!

But is that really so astounding? Up until now, the bane of SF fans was the tendency to lump anything vaguely genre-looking in the same immature-shaped hole labelled 'not literature' or at least 'not worthy'. Librarians and book chains mix Magician and 2001 with a completely straight face. Nowhere does there appear to be a section that isn't headed up by the words “Sci Fi and Fantasy”.

However, the poll has solidified something that I've been gradually becoming aware of. In the magazine SFX, there has been an increasing amount of horror coverage, which to be fair reflects the amount of horror movies newly released and 'SFX' is somewhat of a catch-all for genre fiction anyway. But now there's a rival magazine out there and it had hit the ground running with an equivalently large proportion of the pages devoted to horror. Sci Fi and Fantasy seems to have become Sci Fi, Fantasy and Horror. In some cases without the Fantasy.

Looking for a movie to watch on Virgin Media's on-demand feature, I was presented with a list of categories and it was this that nailed it for me. One of the categories was “Horror and Sci-Fi”. This was interesting all by itself, since within that category I counted thirty eight movies of which an entire four were Sci Fi. Sort of. So few purebred SF titles appeared, that before I'd got halfway through the listing, I was convinced I'd have to include Gremlins which was surely more appropriate as Fantasy. Discounting that, I had three SF titles and one of those was Frankenstein, which we elitists SF types tend to add to the canon because it adds respectability. But if I discount Gremlins, then how can I add Frankenstein which anyone will tell you is (very obviously) a Horror?

The reasoning goes that the Frankenstein novel is often called one of the first examples of true Science Fiction because the power that drives Frankenstein's creature is explicitly derived from science, not magic, in the form of electricity; then new and mysterious but in principle explicable. Primarily, though, any example in cinematic form is going to be labelled a Horror, even if a classic one.

So that left me with two titles from the thirty eight vying to represent our maligned genre. From here it got even more muddled, since the next one in my shortlist was Lord of the Flies. This was even more of a stretch than Frankenstein had been, but as I recalled it from reading it in school, the island setting involved a nuclear war having taken place offstage. (I confess that I haven't been able to support that statement, but it is genuinely how I remember it.) Lord of the Flies is a very literary source novel, much favoured of English teachers and so describing it in genre terms could be taken as a crafted insult. SF's rich heritage is rarely recognised and it is this 'worthiness' distinction that leads to quality SF being lauded as long as the SF part is dismissed.

Worthy, as long as we ignore those troublesome SF elements. Battlestar Galactica was noted by the public as being Science Fiction. Indeed with fleets of spacecraft, space battles, searches for a missing planet and artificial lifeforms that mimic humans, how could anyone mistake it for anything else? Because Battlestar Galactica is really high quality, therefore some commentators have declared that it's not really Science Fiction at all, an opinion shared by some members of the cast! The night before Sky One vanished from Virgin cable boxes, the announcer introduced it with “Forget Sci Fi, this is real drama”. Jeanette Winterson recently wrote a novel containing spacecraft fleeing a dying Earth complete with sentient robots and a post-apocalyptic city.. Jeanette Winterson also hates Science Fiction. She said so in an interview with New Scientist.

Really, I shouldn't have had too many hopes for the movie category which now had a shortlist contained a single item. One film left which was reputedly SF and that was Village of the Damned, based on a novel The Midwich Cuckoos, which actually is truly, authentically Science Fiction. Well, mostly. Primarily it was a still a horror, just like Frankenstein. So the number of possible movie choices I had in that category numbered exactly nothing. I found this slightly bewildering, since the complete A-Z section had Armageddon which I thought (dreadful, brain-dead mess though it may be) would have been an obvious choice as SF. Only, it was Action Adventure. Then there was Deja Vu which has as solid an SF premise as you could ever hope to find, looking back into the past through a wormhole. It was a Sci Fi Thriller, but clearly a thriller with a veneer of SF. Thriller first, anything else second.

So why does no-one seem to know what Science Fiction is anymore?

Did they ever?

I suspect that SF has become less a genre in its own right, than a kind of flavouring for other genres, since SF as a standalone type of story is notoriously hard to quantify. Damon Knight defines it thusly: “science fiction is what we point to when we say it”, whilst Norman Spinrad tells us: “science fiction is anything published as science fiction”. Frederik Pohl is quite explicit: “Science Fiction is what science fiction fans mean when they point to something and say 'That's Science Fiction'”. Can I be correct, then, if I assert the opposite? What if I point to something and say “That isn't science fiction”? Part of the dilemma, I think, is that traditionally distinct Sci Fi elements such as robots, ray guns, rockets and computers are now so much part of mainstream drama, indeed part of real life, that we fail to recognise them as such anymore.

I'm thinking of TV shows like Alias, Spooks and other hi-tech spy thrillers whose plots can revolve around some gimmick or gadget that would have deserved a short story all to itself in the 50s and been hailed as visionary. How often does nanotechnology crop up in these shows? It has reached the status of a tired cliché, if somewhat more advanced in fiction than we've seen in the labs so far. I first encountered the concept of nanotech in an old issue of the role playing magazine White Dwarf, where it described microscopic robots injected into the bloodstream to repair damaged cells. It was dated 1973. Reading New Scientist, such uses now seem merely a matter of waiting until they're ready. Does nanotech even count as SF anymore?

What about computer viruses? Even more than nanotech, they have become solidly embedded in the mainstream. Indeed, computer viruses in drama have become nothing more than a lazy plot device, whose implications are never worked out. Why would I even consider it to be a SF device? It depends where you happen to be in time. The concept of a computer virus was reputedly invented by John Brunner in his 70s novel Shockway Rider, which was an astonishingly prophetic vision of the future. Yet as I was writing this, a computer security firm has stated that there are so many real viruses out in the wild that they've stopped counting them. When did they stop? At a quarter of a million. Yesterday's futuristic SF element has become something that, if you're reading this, you are not unlikely to be sitting within a few feet of one.

The future is become out of date more quickly than ever! The US Army has a working pain ray, we've had rockets for decades and a robot probably built your car. William Gibson – father of Cyberpunk – has even given up trying to predict the future because it's become so difficult. So how can we say what is genuinely Science Fiction when those classically SF trappings are used merely as window-dressing on big-budget-billed-as-SF movies and those trappings are becoming indistinguishable from the world you see outside the window? What does it mean that a writer can create a short story where the big revelatory point is that – shock! - satellite TV can be used to broadcast violence and porn and is an excellent propaganda tool because of it? That's the box I've had in the corner of my living room for a decade. Yet Arthur C Clarke's short story I Remember Babylon was published in 1960. Can we still call it SF? Did it become mainstream by some literary equivalent of radioactive decay?

I didn't know what my conclusion would be when I started to write this. But my take is that anything with overt SF trappings, flavouring, colouring or a veneer of those old-fashioned futures which may or may not take place, has become somewhat muddled with the real world. Technology proceeds at great speed, the understanding in the street is that science and technology between them are capable of anything at all. Even if it's something unlikely, it probably just means (they reckon) that it hasn't escaped from a super-secret government laboratory yet. So it's just another plot device to dump seamlessly into the middle of a TV drama.

And true SF? Or what, with a hint of smugness, I will claim to be the genuine, hard-core stuff that really makes you think? True SF would take that gimmick, that gadget and really work out the consequences of it. In the novel, The Trigger, a device is invented which can throw up a field in which explosives can no longer explode. If that was Alias, then it would either be stolen or destroyed by the end of the episode. The world moves on and so what. The novel, in contrast, explores what such a capability would do to society and it ain't pretty, despite what you might first assume.

My contention, then, is that a properly SF work of fiction doesn't leave the world the way it found it. The world is, effectively, not our world although it starts off the same. And in the true spirit to the quotes earlier, there is plenty of Science Fiction which bears no resemblance to what I just said! In the end, I forgot about trying to watch a movie and instead watched a topical comedy news quiz, Mock the Week.

They were joking about cities rising up on giant robot legs.

Mainstream indeed.

Overhaul

2007-10-20T09:53:00.000Z

Repurposing, revisiting, re-thinking and re-somethinging. All of which means that I may actually start using my blog in earnest.

2007-02-25T15:09:00.000Z

Erk...

Two consumer oriented posts in a row... I must be getting old and fogeyish.

2007-02-25T15:02:00.000Z

Currying Favour

With Currys.digital, the electrical retailer.

I often take a wander around Currys, gawping at all the large TVs and miscellaneous gadgets I can't afford. This being a Sunday was no different, except that for the first time ever I was stopped at the exit and asked to complete a survey. "How do you rate Currys on your visit TODAY". I have no idea why I agreed, but I sat down and prepared to tick off the relevant boxes in the three page form.

Relevant boxes... there didn't appear to be any.

Were staff friendly and courteous? Agree, completely agree, completely disagree? Well I never actually interacted with any of them. Were they well presented? I didn't even look at any of them. What did I think of the queue? Never bought anything so have no idea?

And so forth. When I realised I wasn't able to answer anything fairly, I made my excuses and left. It was only on the way up the road that I realised what had gone wrong. Currys in their wisdom had obviously got a clear idea of the sort of people who visit the shop; people who take note of the staff and the modernity of the surroundings and the clear display of the prices and all the millions of things that never even made it past my consciousness.

None of the questions addressed the sort of consumer I evidently was: I was on my way to Tescos to buy washing powder and only wandered in to Currys see if there was anything new and/or interesting.

There wasn't.

So Currys, sorry about wasting the nicely printed survey form, so here's some feedback by way of recompense: my shopping experience (and I've bought plenty from you over the years) is highly enhanced by not having staff bug me the second I enter through the door and highly enhanced by not asking me to buy extended warranty three times in the same two minutes.

Thank you.

2007-01-20T13:13:00.000Z

Convenience Reduction Measures

The convenience reduction in this case being that the Hydro Electric shop now doesn't take Pay Point payments on Saturdays, only Monday to Friday. Pay Point is designed for all kinds of payments, not just energy bills. I work during the week. If it wasn't for the small detail that I have each Friday afternoon off, it would now be impossible to pay my phone bill.

Not that this is earth-shattering/ insightful/ worthwhile, but it simply has to be recorded for all eternity in case any future alien species arrive and wonder why humans eventually ended up destroying themselves. Beaurocrageddon.

After trying to pay my phone bill, this now seems likely.

I'm Making a Movie!

2007-01-14T11:44:00.000Z

I'm sitting here talking about Doughuts and John F Kennedy being a "Berliner" in preparation to filming the second set of scenes from the short amateur movie myself and the team are filming today. It's a Star Trek fan film and this is a follow up to the full length Trek fan film that we've been making (not finished) over the last few years. The atmosphere is electric - well, relaxed with caffeine hangovers - and we seem to be ingesting as much sugar as possible before kicking off again.

The point is to make use of everything we've "learned" and to press into service the new higher quality equipment.

Ah, rehearsals have begun. I'll have to direct soon...

2007-01-05T21:27:00.000Z

Blogging from Anywhere

All of this still counts as testing. I've just found a blogging app for my pocket pc. So what this means in a practical sense is that I've written this from a rather comfortable armchair, far from the computer and without having to put any distance between me amd thr vodka. (It was a Christmas present and since the chair is situated at the bay window of my third floor flat and the stars are out, I'm having a relaxing time.)

Now I've just got to see if the post works!

And it posted! In the meantime an aircraft just scrawled a vapour trail across the sky, which is now illuminated by the moon. I'm listening to music and it's good to have the TV comprehensively switched off for a change.

2006-11-23T22:24:00.000Z

Buses

It was slightly amusing today on the bus, listening to the passengers bitching about how the 22X hadn't stopped for them. Then later on the journey, more people got on and complained that the 22X hadn't stopped for them either. (We were on the perfectly vanilla No. 22.)

No-one had seemed to grasp the connection between the "X" and the Express part of the story and what being an express actually entails. i.e. not stopping at the in-between bits.

But it was pouring with rain, so no wonder they were upset.

Lucky I had a hat.

2006-11-19T12:55:00.000Z

NaNoWriMo has Stopped!

Well, it has for me anyway. I managed to get 14000 words done - which isn't that bad I guess - but the demands of the movie made me feel guilty every time I tried to write something.

Curses that the very last and most fretful part of making the movie coincided with NaNoWriMo.

Having said that, I hope I'm going to write my novel properly once the dust has settled, because I think I had something fun going on. I enjoyed it anyway!

Hey ho. Here's to the next year! And I might plan it out better next time too.

2006-11-04T21:59:00.000Z

NaNoWriMo has Started!

So I'm writing a novel in a month and after three days, I'm ahead of the needed wordcount by some 200 words. Not enough of a gap I fear! Of course I'm plagued by guilt because I could be doing more stuff on the Intrepid movie, but I figure I'll have the computer rendering while I plot and rattle my muse.

The original idea was to write something very lightweight, silly and something I wasn't too precious about. And now that it's begun, the characters have already taken it in a different direction. Not only that, but I'm coming up with stuff that I thougth was rather more clever than I'd intended for a supposed absurdist romp...

And yes, I'm writing THIS entry while the computer is doing proper work.

2006-10-18T19:16:00.000Z

NaNoWriMo

Well, I finally went and did it. I've signed up to www.nanowrimo.org with the avowed intent of writing a novel in a month. A novel is defined as 50000 words and I have absolutely no chance of achieving this. Hey, it'll be fun and I can bash out a few words when the computer's rendering stuff.

Music and Lyrics

2006-09-15T22:41:00.000Z

Odd thing music. Odd thing having knowledge on tap too. I'm in my mid to late thirties, which means that my musical tastes were formed from listening to audio cassette (and not even the short lived Digital Compact Cassette). More than that, the internet was still an esoteric academic curiosity.

Cut to modern day and I'm listening to my MP3 player whilst sat at the computer. Here comes a song that means a lot to me, for miscellaneous reasons, and now that I'm effectively living in a science fiction future (2006) I can type the song name into Google and instantly find some lyrics so that I can drunkenly sing along (it's also Friday night.)

And this is the point where I'm discovering that all those lyrics which mean so much to me are don't actually exist and the true words to the song are something else. It's only a few words here and there, where I've consistently misheard, bit even so...

What means so much to me, is a phantom. But on the other hand, if I ever somehow write a song, all those powerful moving lyrics are something that I can use for myself because all this time they've only ever been in my head.

2006-08-24T12:19:00.000Z

This is just a quick entry to provide a kind of proof-of-concept, when using Writely, a collaborative online wordprocessor from Google. No doubt when I publish this to my blog there's going to be a Writely icon next to it just to make certain anyone knows about it. The thing that interests me most is the possibility of a few of us all working on the same document from various parts of the world. Or indeed from just down the street. I guess we're all used to the concept of a Wiki now, but wouldn't this be an excellent tool for creating a FAQ?

Basic Assumption

2006-08-16T11:40:00.000Z

Last year I got drawn into a debate on a forum, though not here on Intrepid, concerning the power of science as an explanation for everything. Some people considered science to be little more than a “guess” and naturally my opposing position was that the scientific method leads to a pretty good understanding of the world. As an explanations go, nothing can surpass it. Also, it works. My example was James Clerk Maxwell, a shy, awkward Scotsman who in 1865 formulated some equations with which he'd intended to demonstrate the link between electricity and magnetism. Having successfully done this, a closer look at the same equations also seemed to be saying something new: not only were they linked, the combination of the electrical and magnetic force ought to travel through space.

And that was how radio waves were discovered.

The forum debate concerned, inevitably, religion and the bible and why those provided a better explanation of the world than science. I made the challenge of explaining how it was possible to deduce the existence of radio waves from a reading of the bible. God, as a reason for the world, doesn't have any explanatory depth. “Why?” leads to “Just because.” now and forever. One of the responses was quite sizeable, and this is what leads me to the point I really wish to make.

So large was it that I saved it to disk in order to create a riposte at leisure, but as it happened I slowly realised that I had little idea where to start with it and put it off for a day or so. Eventually I never subsequently found the time to create a coherent answer, and so I fell away from the debate entirely. But now I know what it was that threw me so badly. By co-incidence (and I use that word without any of the irony that it seems to have acquired in modern times) I bought a book within a few weeks of that debate which threw some light on that response, though it took me months to come to really appreciate it.

Called How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, it described at length some economic, political and social fads over the last thirty years or so, some of which were very surprising. Mostly, if I read a book like this – such as The New Apocrypha – I imagine that it will cover some of the more traditional targets such as ghosts, UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster. Here was something quite different. Although the subject matter was not directly supernatural, it did demonstrate how little critical thinking there is in all areas of life. I was surprised to find self-help and business books in general described as a con. Just dress up completely obvious banalities in the language of he mystic – even pretending to be channelling wisdom from dead gurus - and rake in the cash.

So far, all very refreshing to read, but nothing that shed any light on my debate. Until the chapters about post-moderists, I had always used the term post-modern in a loosely colloquial sense of meaning the kind of movie that references itself and was quite aware that it was a movie. A harmless stylistic indulgence in fact. And now here was something which finally threw some light on that response to my message, which I had been unable to make headway with.

An example from How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World:
“Luce Irigaray, a high priestess of the movement, denounced Einstein's E=mc2 as a 'sexed equation', since it 'privileges the speed of light over other [less masculine] speeds that are 'vitally necessary to us'”

Post Moderism, in its full uncut flavour, treats science, society, history, indeed everything as a “text” whose interpretation is no more or less valid than any other interpretation. In essence, meaning and experience are no longer objective. Of course there is much subtly and shifting of definitions between observers, but the implications slowly sunk in as I read and re-read the rest of the book, then confirmed it with a little more research. When I'm in a debate with someone who provides me with a response of the kind I got, it means my basic assumption is wrong.

My basic assumption is that reasoning is a valid tool with which to think about the world. Astonishingly, incredibly, there are people who reject the idea of logical reasoning, indeed reasoning altogether, as being a proper thing to use when describing reality. The responders message now makes more sense to me, even if only on its own terms, and that is why I doubt I could ever rejoin that particular debate. Because all I was doing was bringing some logic to the party.

And who on Earth was going to fall for that one

I'm on the Telly!

2006-08-16T11:09:00.001Z

The title ought to give the whole game away. Channel 4 News had an item a couple of weeks ago about the forthcoming auction of Star Trek memorabilia. As part of the segment, they showed clips from the fan film I'm working on, with a voiceover about how "dedicated" some fans are. I knew in advance that some clips were going to be shown, but I didn't expect it to be a clip with myself in it! But just to prove in what regard we're taken, the other clips were of a Star Trek fan film with all the roles played by dogs!

I haven't arrived quite yet.

Holiday Coming Up

2006-07-30T11:01:00.000Z

August seems to be the traditional time for me to take a fortnight's holiday, although only holiday in the sense of not doing anything rather than "vacationing". So it's with some anticipation that I'll hopefully have a couple of weeks to myself during which time I intend to do nothing, but am unlikely to settle down.
This is because of Intrepid which I am telling myself I will take a break from, but will probably be doing more work on it no matter how sunny it is outside. And here's me with a bicycle and some nice destinations within 30 minutes ride...

2006-07-22T19:13:00.000Z

Lorraine Kelley visits USS Intrepid, with me on the right. There were a whole load of folk here, but if they want to apear then they can create their own blog!

And so it begins

2006-07-22T19:04:00.000Z

Hello. I guess I should be telling you all what's on my mind. Well it's Saturday night and the pizza is on its way. I've got a blog over at USS Intrepid, which has tended to be written as a set of articles rather than a semi-spontaneous stream of consciousness. I had actually kept for a while an online 'journal' back in 1997, but for various reasons I soon gave this up. (Think psycho-ex.) So here we are, whilst I think what exactly I intend to do with this.

USS Intrepid, by the way, is a Star Trek fan film of which I happen to be the director. My profile picture is myself with Lorraine Kelley, who is a TV presenter and also a Star Trek fan. Through a tortous set of events beginning with an article in the New York Times, we came to her attention and subsequently got to meet her.

And that is the current state of play! More later! Maybe!

Why I Shouldn't Skip PE

2006-02-25T12:37:00.000Z

The absolute best story that I ever wrote, indeed probably the best piece of writing I have ever done or will likely ever do in my life, is lost to history. Being lost admittedly polishes it in my memory somewhat, so if by some happenstance I could retrieve it through time it would not likely impress me that much. However, for the purposes of this article it was the best thing written by anyone anywhere.

Unlike most of my writings which I can no longer find, this story was not misplaced or the victim of an accident. It's loss was a deliberate act by someone. Someone with less moral fibre than an IP lawyer, less self-awareness than a burger flipper, someone with a glow-worms' intensity of consciousness. In a paraphrase of Calvin & Hobbes, it's someone with “... a dim perception that nature played a cruel trick on them.” And just because I've still got an epithet spare, someone with all the deductive and reasoning abilities of a can of spam.

It's the fault of a PE teacher. (Unfair generalisations duly noted.)

I skipped PE once, my sole act of rebellion against the crushing oppressiveness of a society that didn't care whose poetic soul got trampled in the race not to be picked last for the fucking five-a-side football. Most of my rebellion consisted of waiting it out until school came to an end naturally, so this was decidedly out of the ordinary for me. After all, wasn't I supposed to be getting educated in school instead of slogging it out running through mud in February? What the hell was the education part of Physical Education?

So one afternoon I decided to hell with this and spent an hour in the park. There were a handful of us who'd decided the same and the time passed in quite a dull fashion. Rebellion didn't have any of the euphoric highs that I might have expected. I can't remember quite what prompted me. Maybe I'd forgotten my gym kit. Maybe it was the prospect of spending more time outdoors in the novel setting of being outside and not having to run anywhere. The details aren't important.

Inevitably there were consequences and I got into trouble because, no master schemer me, they'd noticed that I'd gone. My PE teacher confronted me in the corridor with the result that I got handed a 'blue sheet', which was to say a punishment exercise to write.

That night, in biro, I scribbled out my answer to the punishment question: Why I Shouldn't Skip PE. My muse was obviously active, and in an inspired moment I laid out a series of rigorously logical steps detailing a sequence of events, beginning with my non-attendance of PE and leading to the inevitable destruction of the Earth. Roughly it started with me getting away with it. If I did that, then I'd be tempted to skip other classes. If I got away with that, others would be inspired to do the same. So when the next generation is ready for the workplace, they don't have any useful skills. The economy then collapses and this news will be obvious in our radio and television broadcasts. Any onlooking aliens will see that this is the ideal time to attack a weakened opponent and since not having skills means not being able to invent weapons to defend ourselves, it's game over for Earth. Rigorously logical. I told you.

To this day I still believe it in a fingers-crossed sort of way, but PE teachers being what they are, when I presented this gem of writing it got ripped up in front of me, unread, not even glanced at, and dumped in the bin.

That was the real punishment.

And as it turned out, a rather deeply symbolic moment. That sheet was worth more to me than every PE 'lesson' I'd ever had in my life. Take me cross country running, put me in goal, have me throw medicines balls around, have me do bench presses. At the end of it I've learn nothing, except to hate every PE teacher there has ever been. This is a divide between the body and mind where muscles and looks are respected whereas creativity and intelligence are not. No duh, Sherlock. Smartarse, clever dick, smarty pants, brainiac... all derogatory. Mind is not highly regarded. Young women want to be Paris Hilton. No-one wants to be Jill Tarter. (Go on, Google her.) Guys want to be 50 Cent. No-one wants to be Carl Sagan.

All that, perhaps, is another story.

An old friend of mine once told me how he'd managed to contrive to somehow not be present when a register was taken at the start of the school year for PE, with the result that no-one missed him being absent from PE for a whole year! Now that was smart! He now runs a company.

So go on. Skip PE.

And never stop thinking.