But apparentely not, as Park51 – a recentely planned building development in New York City, which is being referred by many as the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ – has attracted more criticism from shouty, opinionated people than the average audience of the Jeremy Kyle Show. This is where the laws of physics appear to have been rewritten, as Park51 is actually two blocks away from the former location of the World Trade Centre, a full 0.2 miles according to Google Maps. The people criticising the mosque have been acting as though it’s a decadent, 300-foot monumental eyesore filling the exact space where the WTC was, with the bodies of dead US soldiers hanging from the rafters, complete with with the words ‘We Win, America!’ in big neon letters atop a statue of Osama Bin Laden fisting Uncle Sam. In reality, the artist rendition looks just like any old skyscraper you can name in New York City.

Yep, looks like a monument of the Islamization of The West to me.

What’s more, it’s not even a mosque. It’s a community centre, albeit a specifically Islamic one with a mosque inside. What’s the difference there between an Islamic and a Christian community centre? That might sound obvious, but only if you greatly generalise on Islam and fail to distinguish between extremists and moderates. Even if it were a dedicated mosque, the same distinction still applies.

I’ve also been told that the controversy has emerged because the collapse of the Twin Towers had rubble landing on the place where the not-mosque is planned. So, what? That fact is utterly meaningless unless the US want to change their foreign policy to a canine philosophy in which they indicate their borders by where they’ve pissed.

Think I’m exaggerating? Just look at the organisation “Stop Islamization of America” (SIOA), who view the not-ground zero not-mosque to be an indication of the Islamic invasion of the USA and an insult to all the soldiers who died. The SIOA claim to be “a human rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, religious liberty, and individual rights” – judging by their actions and their name – unless you’re a Muslim.

I can see why it might be considered, at most, poor taste. But the vitrolic opposition to the not-mosque has gone far beyond arguing for respecting dead soldiers and have, rather paradoxically, sunk into a all-out display of religious intolerance.

There’s been some comparison with the ‘Draw Muhammed Day’ on Facebook, which is an interesting comparison but not in the way that the SIOA think. ‘Draw Muhammed Day’ was in response to threats by Islamic extremists towards the creators of ‘South Park’ who were poised to depict the prophet of the Muslim faith, which is against Islam. Those who participated in ‘Draw Muhammed Day’ did not do so for any Islamaphobic reason, it was a demonstration that free speech is non-negotiable: no-one is immune to criticism and you cannot bully people into silence through the threat of violence.

The SIOA believe that this is somehow testament to anti-Islam sentiment in the US but this is not the case. ‘Draw Muhammed Day’ was a defence of free speech, which is the complete opposite of what the SIOA is about. They want to prevent the building of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’, even though doing so is explicitly against free expression and ignores freedom of religion, which was one of the founding principles of America.

I’m not taking the piss out of the attacks of September 11th because I’m not a completely heartless bastard. Nor am I taking the piss out of Islam — because I like my head — but this arguement is totally fucking ridiculous. It is not a mosque. It is not on ‘Ground Zero’. Blocking it’s building is against the freedom of expression and religion that the US is itself founded on and those very soldiers died defending. I can only conclude, therefore, that those opposing the not-mosque are doing so purely out of religious prejudice. Maybe that’s unfair, as simply the bandied-about name ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ immediately creates two misconceptions on this issue, but anyone willing to look into it for half a second can find the facts of the matter. So it’s really down to a combination of prejudice and ignorance — a lethal combination in any context.

UPDATE: Someone has just pointed out to me that this post is remarkably similar to an article by Charlie Brooker on the same issue. Brooker’s column is far funnier, uses similar techniques of hyperbole and ridiculing the pointlessness of the debate, and it was also done about two weeks ago. I actually hadn’t seen it before I wrote this post but it looks as though I’ve copied his points, just putting that out there.

Incidently, I wrote about last year’s music event and made some semi-serious predictions for 2010.

Of course, the event began with Steve Jobs’ usual self-congratulatory ejaculation as he delights in just how well his products have sold, ignoring the criticism that the iPhone 4 had. Then he spends half an hour rolling around in piles of your money. YES! YOUR MONEY! YOU PATHETIC PRICK!

Ahem…

The sixth-generation iPod Nano is perhaps the biggest overhaul, mainly because it’s no longer a Nano — more a result of a horrific gene-splicing experiment between the Touch and the Shuffle. It’s inherited the Shuffle’s belt-clip and restores the square form factor that the third generation Nano had. Instead of the new Nano being a diminutive version of it’s Classic brother, it now sports a fetching touch-screen. This multi-touch (and no, I don’t know why you’d need multi-touch on an iPod Nano) and capacitive addition essentially does away entirely with the original iPod layout we’ve all come to know which, given that no new Classic announcements were given, marks the death of it’s former look. Instead of a click-wheel, the entire front of the device is a touch-screen, allowing navigation of the device. From the images I’ve seen, it does look like this screen is far too small and cramped to be comfortably used, although the newly redesigned interface for the Nano clearly has a touch-screen in mind. But the main reason I’ve not bought an iPod Touch already is the notorious fragility of touch-screens — I’m not convinced.

The iPod Touch has also had a minor touch-up, but nothing like the plastic surgery of the Nano. It’s slimmer, which by now is practically assumed of any newly released device, and has a screen supporting Apple’s randomly-named ‘Retina Display’. Another throwback to the iPhone 4 is the front facing camera (and the inclusion of a back-facing camera) to allow Apple’s new video-calling service FaceTime over Wi-Fi — given it has no 3G antenna band to get screwed up, this iPod might be less of a commercial balls-up than it’s cousin, iPhone.

In perhaps the biggest U-turn since Clinton, Apple have reunited the iPod Shuffle with it’s buttons. The last iteration of the cheap and chirpy noisemaker removed almost all the physical buttons on the device itself, meaning it had to be controlled instead by the buttons on the tinny travesty of headphones that come in the box, and navigation was aided by an almost as tinny voice. Though the voice remains (which is fine given most Apple fanboys hear voices anyway, mainly telling them to buy more Apple products), the buttons are back.

In a display of balls-out ripoffery, Apple have taken several chapters out of MySpace and Spotify’s books and will introduce a music-oriented social-network feature into the next incarnation of iTunes, known as ‘Ping’. Essentially, this will broadcast your appreciation of ‘The Fast Food Rockers’ to your friends, leave you without any friends and persuade you to find solace in the purchase of an iPad. I kid, of course. The real point is that you see what your friends are listening to and then you (because life is one big futile attempt at gaining social acceptance) purchase the same songs to demonstrate just how like-minded you are with your mates — kerching for Apple. Like a bit of Tinchy Stryder do you? No, you don’t. Nobody does. Everybody just thinks they should.

Something happened to do with the Apple TV, but that’s irrelevant seeing as nobody bothers with them — not while we’ve got Sky+ at least. It’s smaller, obviously, and is just a media streamer for your computer to your TV but with it’s own film and TV rental service. Boring.

All in all, the Nano is the biggest change, which is usually the case at Apple’s September music event. I’ve always loved the Nano precisely because it’s a middle-ground between the cheap but relatively feature-less Shuffle and the complex, expensive Touch — now, the Nano is less intermediate and more horrendously choreographed mix’n'match. Nothing unexpected or unusual, Steve Jobs didn’t come out in a floral dress and announce his impending sex change. Nor did he emerge holding Bill Gates’ hand, vindicating years of rumours. Once the Nano hype has died down, the tech world will breathe a collective ‘meh’ at yesterday’s announcement and we can all get on with our lives.

Fear not, though, because my articles (that would otherwise come to form the content of blog posts) are available to read on the CNET UK website. What’s more, these articles are edited for the gramatical, spelling and factual errors that sometimes grace this blog (I’ve noticed several reading back but I’m going to leave them in to prove a point) so you can expect a higher quality – obviously, this means that my brash tone is also filtered but that’s only to be expected (I was unable, for example, to refer to the Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s boast about Android sales as a self-congratulatory blowjob).

As dedicated as all three of you are to me, I don’t expect you to trawl CNET tirelessly for what I’ve written so here’s an RSS feed link of my name put into the website’s search engine, plus it’s better than posting a link to each one in a bout of shameless self promotion.

It be here.

Enjoy.

Nonetheless, as I mentioned briefly in my last post, I am currently working at CNET UK as an intern.

Here’s a link to my first article to be put on the sight. Enjoy!

Snake Game Hidden in YouTube: Procrastiantion Squared!

I was suprised, when I found this novel, that it was only some 65 pages in length, to the point that many publishers print it alongside some of Stevenson’s other short stories and a wealth of annotations and background information, to pad out the book to sell more easily as a product.

This novel is as gripping as the other great gothic horrors, but perhaps isn’t as terrifying by modern standards; but this is, I increasingly feel, a symptom of Victorian literature: there’s very few horrors that took the imagination of those authors that hasn’t already been dreamt up, and doubled in horror, in 2010. Stevenson’s descriptions are vivid and tantalysing, and would’ve astounded the reader when it was published in 1886, but given we can basically replace our imaginations with TV, it’s hard to conjure up (based on Stevenson’s descriptions) an image as disturbing as one that can be simulated with a combination of CG and the fucked up mind of Tim Burton.

There’s an odd irony in the fact that, just as Dr. Jekyll (through his discovery) adopts a face and personality quite different yet still somehow, at it’s core, the same as his own, many stage and screen adaptations of Stevenson’s classic novel drop a great deal of the storyline, characters and subtleties of the original but maintain the core concept. To paraphrase (because it’s hard to hold open a book and type simultaneously) Dr. Jekyll “it seemed more express than the divided countenance I had become accustomed to call mine.” Rather than putting together a somewhat fragmented narrative as the novel does, jumping between Utterson being told a story by Enfield, Utterson’s own investigative narration, Lanyon’s letter and Jekyll’s closing statement of the case, directors often opt to follow (without narration) the chronological events of Jekyll and Hyde.

By all means read this novel, lit’s a rather unsettling examination of dual-personalities, half of which emerges from the legacy that the novel left, from the allegorical meaning behind the Jekyll/Hyde creature that emerges (Jekyll’s apparent struggle to know what to refer to himself as I found engaging), but also for the sheer enjoyment of the tale. I’ve often said that the lasting feature of gothic horror novels isn’t the imagery or the propensity of disturb, but more the psychological element, the reflection into one’s very soul and showing the harsh ugliness (and sometimes beauty) within.

P.S. Sorry for the short review, that new Sherlock Holmes series with the writers from Doctor Who starts soon. Oh, by the way, so that I can bend instead of break, my cardinal rule not to discuss personal matters, or anything not pertaining to the point, on this blog, I will only briefly mention that I got an internship at CNET UK and start on Wednesday.

One of the biggest criticisms of 3D, and one of the main reasons why it is yet to hit the big-time in home entertainment, is the clunky polarised spectacles that frequently make a screening of Toy Story 3 look like a librarian convention.

The Nintendo 3DS is the first commerically available product that attempts to use 3D technology, without condemning gamers to the same dowdy fate, and it’s success is yet to be decided. The technology behind (or should that be in front of) the 3DS’ three-dimensional screen is called a Parallax Barrier and, though it can allow the user to perceive a 3D image, it has massive limitations and would be hard-pressed to stand up to proper scrutiny (for a more in-depth look at Parallax Barriers, see Nintendo 3DS: How It Works). However, recent reports indicate that manufacturers, such as Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba, are investigating ways of putting Parallax Barriers onto their latest range of 3D televisions.

Cinema’s have, by now, become used to dealing with 3D films; the sudden explosion of 3D films, with the use of more sophisticated technologies than the primitive red-cyan affair, last summer forced cinemas to adapt and, almost a year later, it has become commonplace. However, it was (arguably) easier for cinemas to sell 3D as, by and large, people come to the cinema with the explicit purpose of seeing a film, thus the environment was well-suited and the audience willing to accept the glasses. At home there is no such guarantee, and surveys indicate that people are far more likely to multi-task while watching a film or TV, making the latter almost like background noise. The inception of High-Definition TV has been an unsteady one, as people are, again, less likely to invest in something that they will only half-appreciate; at least here, the only issue is cost which has gradually come down and, combined with major sporting events, allowed a greater uptake. 3D, on the other hands, makes more physical demands. The only way to ensure a great enough uptake to warrant the investment from film studios is to eliminate the glasses, but is using parallax barriers really the right way to go about it?

As we saw in a previous article on MediaKick, there are massive limitations to using this technology, which make the glasses almost seem bearable, the most prominent of which being the fact that a full 3D image is only acheivable if the viewer sits at a very precise angle and manages to remain perfectly still for the duration; making 3D at home a choice between neckstrain or eyestrain. Obviously, this fact has not gone unnoticed by the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world, and are attempting to reduce (if not remove altogether) the problem using what’s being dubbed ‘multi-parallax’. Essentially, multi-parallax (as the name suggests) uses several barriers (in Toshiba’s case, nine) to create nine “golden angles” at which the full 3D image can be perceived, over the Nintendo 3DS’ solitary angle.

No doubt Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba’s R&D departments will spend the next few months painstakingly experiementing to find out which “golden angles” are needed to ensure the viewer gets all the 3D goodness they can, but either way there is still this damning drawback on parallax barriers. Film buffs, who are always the first to take up a new home cinema technology but always to first to trash it, will marvel at the crisp graphics, but fume when their head slips slightly and the screen looks like the cameraman suddenly developed cataracts.

Apologies for my absence of late, I have had a number of things to deal with; fortunately I’ve got a lot of draft posts to complete and post so anticipate a lot of activity in the coming days, starting with this Dracula review……you know what, this font is really hard to read so I’m going to find something a bit more legible.

It was the great thinkers of our time 3OH!3 who once said “Tell your boyfriend if he says he’s got beef,
that I’m a vegetarian and I ain’t f****** scared of him” and never were truer words spoken. However, it may now be even easier for the aforementioned boyfriend to obtain his beef with which to threaten human-herbivores as Amazon have lifted the moratorium on their new grocery delivery service, still in beta, in the UK to compete with supermarkets.

Amazon has not, though, opened a warehouse of their own produce, and instead the service will simply be a middleman between retailers, suppliers (and people who have a festering old can of tuna stashed away) and the consumer. Much as you can buy practically any item on Amazon from other sellers, often at a lower price like the infamous 1 penny books, the grocery department will be the first to list items exclusively available from third party sellers. Though no official confirmation has been given, the online retailer’s normal procedure of delivering goods through the post will likely be used in this service also.

Obviously, home grocery delivery is relatively old hat as practically every big UK supermarket has it in some form, but this is the first attempt by an already established exclusively-online store to do so. Ocado is currently the only other web-only service of this type, albeit with only moderate success, while Tesco, Asda and Sainsburys (to name but a few) have been running these services parallel to their brick-and-mortar stores for years. The first attempt to make a service like this work was Webvan in 1999, which went bankrupt in 2001 (though resurrected by Amazon themselves last year, presumebly as a precursor for this) and was described by CNET as one of the greatest dotcom disasters in history, probably just after the dotcom bubble burst and the continuing existence of Fred.

Though this sounds disgustingly like a fat-man’s eBay, it’s actually an interesting (if a little bit odd) exploration of the concept of The Long Tail. A Web 2.0 model that describes the capacity for exclusively-online stores to stock less popular products (“niches”) as well as the bracket of the most popular products (“hits”) as webspace and bandwidth costs are, more or less, negligible, whereas brick-and-mortar stores have limited shelf-space so much inhibit themselves to the “hits”. It’ll be interesting to see what manner of rare, unusual or plain weird foods will become available on such a well known company’s website once it begins democratising the trade of groceries, have you ever tried sauerkraut?

Presumebly this is only the first step in a new laziness-paradigm, all we need now is a legion of domestic robots, mass-marketing of Steven Hawking’s infra-red ‘blink switch’ computer controls and some sort of food to mouth interface for the Disney classic Wall-E to become eerily prophetic.

That’s it, now go wash your hands – the postman’s here.

The Doctor: Matt Smith has inhabited the role and I have no way of criticising him for it. He’s a damn fine actor who has successfully given us The Doctor as we know him with enough new traits to make him distinguishable. Is he as good as Tennant? No, I’m afraid he’s not been quite as awesome as good old Ten, but the predecessor had three (point five) series’ to make his mark and Smith has only just ended his first (reportedly, out of five) so I still consider it early days. He’s a fantastic Doctor, but had a hard act to follow.

Amy Pond: Little bit disappointed with how this companion worked out. It seemed early on that Amy would be a new angle on a companion but, for most of the series, that was forgotten and instead other writers used her in the capacity of standard companion acting as the voice of the audience and her “issues” only came up when needed during Moffat episodes. For Amy’s part, they could’ve done more to seed her significance into other episodes rather than using it to beat you over the head every third episode.

Rory Williams: Again, a touch disappointing. Rory was, undoubtedly, intended as the comic relief throughout the series but he was, in that respect, far too similar to Mickey Smith. Both began as the clumsy source of annoyance who, as the series developed, grew into a hero. He had his moments, but he was too much of a cookie-cutter companion.

River Song: I’m simulataneously infuriated by and enjoying the ongoing tale of River Song. Given that she’s meeting The Doctor out of sync she is in a unique position to keep giving prophetic insight into the future of the show, and it’s pretty clear that she’s going to turn out to be wildly significant in Who-fandom in the coming years. I imagine Alex Kingston’s been paid a hefty sum to commit to the series long-term so that these hints can be explained and I’m glad, because she’s an immensely enjoyable character (sort of like a female Captain Jack) to watch.

Favourite Episode: Ooo, that’s tricky, but it’s probably either Victory of the Daleks or The Lodger. The former because of it’s historical references, continuity, geek factor and comedy, and the latter for it’s ball-scratching simplicty. The Dalek episode was part of the ongoing redevelopment of Doctor Who and so covered a lot of back-references, plus the relationship between The Doctor and Churchill (who had already met) was refreshing. The Lodger was a suprise considering it was the annual “cheap episode”, which have a history of sucking like a Henry Hoover on crack, and had a lot of appeal despite being a complete departure from the usual Who format with as much human drama, which would usually make me wince, as Sci-fi nerdgasm. I can’t continue without mentioning the fantastic Spitfire-Dalek Saucer dogfight in space, a completely ridiculous notion but fantastic all the same!

Worst Episode: I’m going to say The Beast Below which, on the surface, seemed like a chilling examination of nightmares but was actually a bit dull. It had a good story and morality tale, and I loved the introduction of Liz X and the twist at the end, but the threat of the baddie never really took given that they spent most of the story standing atop the whale and the smiler things never really seemed all that scary.

The Finale:

This entire series has felt like a massive build up, any stories with no references to the Cracks tended to be incredibly weak, and so you went into the last two episodes expecting a lot, and the penultimate episode “The Pandorica Opens”, at least, delivered. The appearance of so many aliens trapping The Doctor was a nice touch but, for both practical and time reasons, not one that would’ve been carried too far, given the intense amount of preparation that must’ve gone into the five minute sequence of trapping The Doctor in the Pandorica. Disappointingly, the entrapment in the Pandorica had to be resolved quickly, as an episode with The Doctor locked away would’ve been slow and tedious, but was done quite well using the viewer’s skewed perspective on time travel. Was there a better moment in that episode than the beaten up Doctor appearing with no warning from nowhere and, seemingly, dying. Although, giving The Doctor a Vortex Manipulator to jump around with helped the story along, but removed the impact of the TARDIS “exploding”.

There were obvious moments of science-fiction shruggery, again diluting the impact of Amy’s “death” using some bullshit explanation of the Pandorica being able to prevent death so the prisoner couldn’t escape, the Pandorica was that secure (though the Sonic was able to open it with relative ease), or the idea that The Pandorica light held a “restoration field”. As well as the ultimate closer of the episode where, after spending an emotive ten minutes explaining how the resetting of the universe came at the cost of his non-existence, The Doctor was able to be “remembered” back sat with me as the biggest cop-out imaginable. Ultimately, the story became a massive set up resolved by a reset button so big it could be seen from another galaxy, if they existed in that universe, and a massive retcon always feels like a cop-out. Then again, Doctor Who has a history of leaving things ambiguous (by which I mean the writers got a bit lazy and gave up), for example they’ve still never explained Colin Baker; what the hell was he?

Overall, a fun story with ongoing significance. The arc over this series appears relatively wrapped up but an ultimate arc, perhaps over the course of The Eleventh Doctor’s life, has been hinted at. We still need to learn the cause of the TARDIS explosion and the owner of the chain-smoker voice that echoed through the TARDIS. I also found it interesting that, once again, The Doctor is called into action, presumebly hinting at the Christmas Special. On one hand, it gives The Doctor a direction, of sorts, where instead of simply knocking around the universe and running into this stuff, he’s actively called to it, but on the other it gives The Doctor a musty, ninteen-seventies detective agency vibe which I dislike.

Of course, it doesn’t end here. Blood of the Cybermen is now available to download on the BBC Website.

In the past 12 months, 3D has become the new black in cinema with every major studio releasing at least one three-dimensional film. But for all our CG technology and on-screen wizardry, we’re still forced to cling to our lenticular goggles to see it with, take them off and you’re left with a movie that looks like the cameraman had the tremors. For a while that was also true in the relatively new arena of 3D gaming, luckily for most gamers appearing geeky was nothing new, but now (as MediaKick’s superb and very prolific E3 coverage has revealed) with the announcement of Nintendo’s 3DS device, providing a 3D gaming experience without having to look like Austin Powers seems to be the start of a whole new triple-dimensional revolution.

Providing a 3D image, or (to be insufferably pedantic) autosteroscopy, traditionally used specially adapted glasses which, most commonly through the use of colour filtering on anaglyph (red and cyan) images but more recentely through polarised lenses, block out one image of a 3D film, shot with two very similar but ever so slightly different angles, for each eye. As each eye receives a slightly different image, the brain attempts to marry the two angles into a comprehensible image and the effect is the appearance of depth.

However, this system has always depended on the ability to isolate one particular angle for one particular eye, relying on the glasses to do so. This is a perfectly fine trade-off for cinemas, where you go for the specific purpose of watching a movie and are in a suitably adapted environment to do so, but serious questions have been raised to the quality of 3D films in the home and how much people, who may only casually watch films, will want or use the 3D technology. For example, the increasing number of people who use the internet and watch TV or movies simultaneously suggests that, as 3D technology relies on peoples eyes remaining focused on the images, and behind filtering lenses, it would not be as successful or appealing as it has been in the cinema.

The same can be said for gaming, though it’s much harder to be multi-tasking whilst playing a video game (especially if you’re a man), the growth of so-called “casual games”, as you commonly see for the Nintendo Wii, making video games, as the name suggests, a casual pastime, ridding the world of these headache inducing specs seems like a good idea; the Nintendo 3DS is the first serious attempt at making that happen, by utilising ‘parallax barrier technology’. Parallax Barriers come in the form of a thin and (apparentely) transparent layer that is fitted in front of an LCD screen that is fitted with thin “slits” that filter out an angle to each side so that one eye sees only one angle and the 3D image is perceived. A massive drawback of this is that the full effect is only visible from a very precise angle with an extremely low margin of error, requiring anyone attempting to see a film in 3D to sit as though they are experiencing some manner of rectal insertion. With the growth of games, also announced at E3, to use movement controls, such as Microsoft’s Kinect, this is a totally opposite paradigm to the one sharply taking effect.

The recentely announced Nintendo 3DS uses the same parallax barrier on it’s upper screen to produce a three-dimensional image to the player, and carries all the limitations of the technology, though it does away with the glasses. From observation, no clear effort has been made by Nintendo to combat the disadvantages of using parallax barriers, with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata insisting that the screen angle is perfectly suited for the way the average gamer would hold the device naturally, though this only mitigates the problem somewhat and the limitations are still very evidence. Although, a number of potential solutions, shown off by developers at E3 could be seen on later models of the 3DS; such as utilising the camera, face recognition algorithms and an automatically adjustable screen to constantly move the 3D screen to the correct angle as the player’s head (and thus angle of vision) moves.

It seems that 3D technology is continuing to develop just as any massively new innovation would, it has some limitations but looks very promising. Nintendo has jumped the gun a tad and released the 3DS almost, it seems, as an experiment and a “field test” would do wonders for accelerating the development and understanding of how 3D technology in gaming will be used. But for now, at least, the gamer is stuck with the glasses, unless they want to entirely boycott the upcoming motion-wars between Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.