The Opinion Engine 2.0:17/31:What's the most exciting thing you see on the way to work?

Guest answer from Jess Haskins.

Life First, what work for me is — I'm a game designer. I work at a small game development studio in New York City called Muse Games. Earlier this year we moved our office from a loft in Chinatown to an office block in the Financial District, right on Bowling Green. In the weeks that followed our move, we experienced an earthquake, a hurricane, a flood warning, and the dawn of a protest movement: Occupy Wall Street.

I pass Zuccotti Park on my way to work every day, and I first noticed that something was happening when on my morning walk I was joined by a merging phalanx of drum-tapping, horn-tooting, sign-bearing, mask-wearing protesters. As I read their signs and listened to the sound of their chants and matched the cadence of their steps, I inhaled deeply and breathed it in. I was marching! I was protesting! At the next corner, they turned and I kept going straight, resuming my New-York-paced speedwalk, once more weaving and dodging into the crowd instead of trundling along with it in synchronized solidarity.

From then on, I watched the burgeoning movement with interest, observing the daily evolution of the protest campsite: the information desk and its staffers, the expanding library, the cardboard Faux News cameras, the print edition of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. (OWS was making its own media, as the mainstream media seemed conspicuously absent from this engaging and newsworthy scene.) Although I didn't feel the urge to participate personally, I appreciated the efforts of the protesters and admired their presence and perseverance. I sympathized with their message and hoped the movement would be a success.

Zuccotti Park ready for public enjoyment

But I don't want to talk about the park. The park is empty now, stormed and swept and cleared away so that the space could be freed up for the use of "the public" — now it's a sea of barricades and trees decorated for the holidays, ringed with police and a handful of hangers-on and of no use to anyone at all. I don't want to talk about the park. I want to talk about the bull.

A few blocks from Zuccotti Park is Bowling Green, site of Charging Bull, the famous statue representing the virile capitalist vigor of Wall Street. Our office building sits directly opposite the statue, affording us an excellent view of the daily throngs of tourists queuing up and massing around it, snapping photos, clambering over its back, swinging from its horns, and polishing its scrotum for luck. But this ritual molestation is a thing of the past — since the outbreak of the Occupation, the barriers went up around the bull, too, and now it enjoys the protection of a 24-hour security detail. The poor tourists can only stand around the outside of the pen for their photos, sometimes leaning over for an awkward hug with one of the horns before running over to pester the cops for more photos and directions to Century 21. (It's up Broadway. Just keep walking.)

A frustrated tourist reaches for the bull's horns

It's for the bull's own good. Since OWS kicked off with Adbusters' poster of a revolutionary ballerina poised atop Charging Bull's head, with a vanguard of occupiers rushing forward from the misty background, the statue, with all its loathsome, potent symbolism, must have been deemed a prime target for the movement's rage. As far as I know, no shenanigans have been attempted by occupiers (the last prank I remember directed at the hapless bovine was the painting of its balls blue during the depths of the recession over a year ago), and all I can think of is how disappointed the tourists must be. Apparently the bull is a big deal in some parts of the world, and people come from far away just to see it — then to be forced to stand back and have to grope it clumsily while stretched across a crowd barrier! For one day only I saw the cops allowing the tourists to line up and enter the pen one at a time for hugs and photos, as if the bull were signing autographs. That didn't stick, though, and the next day it was back to leaning on barricades, longing to get just a little closer to the symbol and source of all that throbbing financial potency. Just a few blocks away people were camping out 'round the clock in the deepening cold to protest a corrupt and exploitative financial establishment, while here just down the road were people who had traveled thousands of miles just to line up and fondle the testicles of the establishment's graven idol.

I thought up a game for Occupy Wall Street. It's a mobile game. There are crowds of people filling a public square, and you are Charging Bull. With a flick of your finger you send Charging Bull careering through the crowds. Every time you hit someone they fall down and some money flies out, and they yell out a slogan, like "People Not Profits!" or "Make Love Not Toxic Assets Repackaged As Junk Derivatives And Foisted On The American Taxpayer!" You eat the dropped money, which represents your score. The crowd has a a 1% chance of spawning a suited investment banker who will jostle his way through the crowd; if you hit a one-percenter, he will yell a slogan like "Get a job!" or "Corporations are people, too!," then the game immediately ends and you lose. There will also be white-shirted police officers who move through the crowd, randomly pepper-spraying people who will fall down and stop moving (but you can still hit them and get their money). If you hit the white shirt, he will pepper-spray down your throat and you will regurgitate and lose all the money you have collected so far. The game ends when you have collected all the money from the people and retire to a villa in the Caribbean. I call it Bowling for Green.

The Opinion Engine 2.0: 16/31:Republic of the Moon at FACT.

Press view invite from FACT in Liverpool.

Art When was the last time you looked at the Moon? Properly looked at it? Walking around Republic of the Moon it occurred to me how much I took for granted one of the most extraordinary examples of natural beauty, one which is accessible to our wonder every evening no matter our geographic location (depending on weather conditions) and which as the work demonstrates is almost unique in its ability to inspire both those who comprehend it with their imagination and those who strive to measure its properties, artists and scientists.

It’s apt that Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is still playing at FACT's cinema (just about) with its flashback sequences showing the production of Meliere's Le Voyage dans la lune. Like him, these artists seek to investigate humanities motivation in choosing to go to the moon through fantastical elements and fictions. The gallery guide mentions the recent Mars 500 ‘wood panelled spacecraft’ in Moscow, six men simulating a space mission on the ground. Through another prism that would be performance art.

In Enter At Own Risk, 2011 We Colonised the Moon, Hagen Betzwiser and Sue Corke imagines the work of lunar scientists on the moon’s surface, specifically the smell generated by moon dust as they re-entered the lunar module. They’ve attempted a recreation, which to my nasal cavity is somewhat like the Yankee Candle shop but through scratch and sniff postcards has been confirmed by one of the actual astronauts. One of the repeated elements of the exhibition is the revealing of little known facts about our natural satellite.

Beyond an airlock which reminds us of the preparatory processes from FACT’s previous success, ZEE, a room is set out like a mock up of the lunar surface and visitors at the weekend will be able to see the artist’s own astronaut recreating a moon mission, gardening the artificial rocks. We received a preview and its an eerie experience not least because as a group we were awed into silence presumably so as not to distract the performer from their task. We met the person behind the mask later but I won’t spoil their anonymity.

The last Apollo landing was by the Soviet Union, when in 1976, the Lunik 24, an unmanned probe stopped off for twenty-four hours and collected moon rocks. Leonid Tishkov cherishes that fact and in Private Moon he personalises it by presenting a series of photos illustrating the story of man who meets the moon and decides to spend the rest of his life with it. These are beautiful evocations of the city, illuminated by the moon itself carried about like the heart in the promo for Rodger Sanchez’s Another Chance, a reference he probably wasn’t intending.

Similarly its unlikely Sharon Houkema had the rippling moon of the surface of the water in the opening titles of Arena, the BBC’s arts strand when producing M3, but as it ebbs and flows on the wall above us, it replicates the same broken quality in a clever adaptation of an overhead projector. As the accompanying text describes: “The moon image – often surrounded with mysticism, romanticism and fantasy – is rendered (un)intelligible, yet the magic doesn’t disappear, it merely switches position.”

The point were science and art properly coexist is in Andy Gracie’s Drosophila Titanus a small display which gathers evidence of the artist’s attempt to breed a fruit fly capable of withstanding the extreme conditions on Titan (Saturn’s moon) (which you already knew) (sorry to insult your intelligence). When Gracie says the experiment could take many thousands of generation it gains an epic quality even on discovering the life cycle of the fly is nine days. One of the outcomes will be in seeing how mutant strains and deformities can speed up the process.

Liliane Lijn imagined in 1992 a moment when she’d behold it and see the word printed across it in block capitals, the celestial body becoming a metaphor for the female body which it already effects indirectly. He decades long project has resulted in a video piece representing her vision which shifts every twenty-six hours in time with its actuality, the natural lunar cycle suggestion a gender transformation as SHE becomes HE and back again. In the darkness of the media lounge, moonememe is accompanied by the voice of Lijn and a friend vocalising these shifts.

If you take my advice you will visit the media lounge then Gallery Two first because for once it’s Gallery One (opposite the box office) which provides the grand finale and perhaps one of the most original, astonishing, exciting art pieces these thirty-seven year old eyes has seen, a work which taps directly into my whimsy gene with its poignancy. Glimpsing at it through a window on an exterior wall as I arrived for the press view suggested this would be a simple reproduction of the control room for a moon mission.  I was wrong.

At which point the title does much of the work. Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility takes it inspiration from Francis Goodwin’s Jacobian utopian fantasy novel The Man in the Moone, which recounts the diary of one Domingo Gonsales who’s carried to the moon in a chariot by geese and the artist has bred eleven of the fowl at an analogue for the moon in Italy, the secret success being that instead of simply faking these elements, we’re seeing their behaviour live.

None of which really describes the excitement of being in the room, the attention to detail of some of the elements, and it’s not supposed to. You have to visit, even for ten minutes, even if you’re primarily in the building to go the movies (though chances are whatever you’re seeing will have a tenth of the imagination of this). It’s rare that I become quite so evangelic about an art piece but along with the accompanying film which charts the development of the experiment, Meyer-Brandis captures the magic of Melieres through even more dimensions than Hugo.  Breathtaking.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:15/31:Are You Easily Distracted?

Guest answer from Karie (@kariebookish).

Life The fact that I had to be asked three times to contribute this piece says a lot. I am not sure if I can blame impending middle-age or the internet. What did you say .. oh, look! A funny dog video! All I know is that I have been meaning to make that important phone call for two months and I nearly forgot the postal deadline for sending Christmas presents abroad but I am able to tell you all about a trampoline being blown away in Scotland and a dog chasing deer outside London. Has my brain succumbed to memes?

Maybe our brains are not wired for this post-industrial age of information. Information used to have gate keepers: people who made sure that we did not get distracted from important local news by stories about US mall officers tracking down owners of lost envelopes. These days our gatekeepers seem to be the people who find the most obscure piece of news and spread it via Reddit or Metafilter until it ends up on Twitter and then Facebook where your aunt will read it and email it to you three months after you first plus-'d-oned it. Can our brains be trusted to filter the deluge of information and suss out which are the important things to remember?

So, the way information has disseminated has changed irrevocably. Arguably the ways we receive, store and process information have also changed. Twenty years ago the critic Donna Haraway wrote her famous “Cyborg Manifesto”. The manifesto uses the concept of “cyborg” as a feminist metaphor, but Haraway's essay is eerily prescient. We receive, store and process information as though we are machines although I'd say we are closer to being conduits than actual machines. Can we be so distracted that we forget we are human?

I used to think of myself as a woman of the modern age – someone who looked at buildings as machines and saw art as an escape from emotion. I confess there has been a change and that I am more a romantic in the old 19th century sense of the word. I find myself becoming increasingly interested in the ideas of authenticity and origin. Words that I should be rejecting as obsolete in this day and age. I think I am reacting to my own distracted state of being: I crave slowness and I need time to think in order to connect to myself again. I read books (not on a Kindle although I am clearly the demographic for it) and I knit (preferably from yarn so authentic that I know the name of the sheep) – both gestures reaching back through time though interestingly also both infinitely now gestures.

2011 was the year of protests, so the media tell us. I like to think that my brain has protesting against what I have been doing to it. Will 2012 be the year of Luddism? Will I remember to make that phone call and write letters? Ask me next year.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:14/31:Torchwood's Web of Lies.

TV  Revisiting Torchwood’s Miracle Day, this summer’s great televisual disappointment in any form is rather like picking at a scab, but for completion sake I did buy a copy of the blu-ray if only to see if the commentaries would offer any indications as to what went wrong. Recorded during post-production for the last episode by Russell T Davies and Julie Gardener it is possible to hear some weary exhaustion and with all of the criticism and qualifications of their own work, we can now take the view that they had a massive loss of confidence when faced with working in a new idiom and followed too many dodgy notes from Starz as to how to make the programme.  Meanwhile, it sounds as though the BBC just left them to get on with it.

Amongst the other extras are a deleted scene which allows us to watch Alexa Havens park a car outside an airport over and over and over again (and for no good reason it turns out) and this “motion comic” Web of Lies originally released on iTunes in ten weekly chunks during the original broadcast. Already finding the forty-five minutes or so of the main series quite enough to slog through per week I decided to leave my enjoyment of this as late as possible and so here we are at the closing of the year. I could of course have waited until next year’s Doctor Who drought but decided that the last thing I wanted was for Torchwood’s Miracle Day to spread across any more of my calendar, especially since it looks like it’s never coming back anyway.

In the event, Web of Lies is about as I expected with just a few surprises. Split between two time frames, it sees Holly, a surprisingly connected young woman, investigating the shooting of her brother during Miracle Day and in parallel, a flashback sequence set during Torchwood’s first season in which Gwen travels the world searching for a kidnapped Jack, the two stories ultimately segwaying in a way that Immortal Sins failed to. At half an hour it doesn’t outstay its welcome and Jane Espenson’s script flows pretty well so long as you keep in mind that the reason everyone keeps repeating themselves every three minutes is because we’re skipping the week in between, and narrative leaps are because the interactive elements are missing.

The pre-release/publication/download excitement was because of the appearance of Eliza Dushku as the lead though there’s two obvious disappointments. As well as the aforementioned isolation from actual Torchwood, thereby nullifying hope of a kind of faux-Faith/Jack stand-off, Holly isn’t drawn to look like her either, the artist clearly a fan of Maggie Hopey from Love and Rockets (see above). Of course, in animation such things aren’t to be expected, but since the rest of the cast includes Jesse Eisenberg and Daniel Craig (at least in terms of drawing inspiration), it’s a shame the artist didn’t decide to give Eliza her tru calling (sorry). Perhaps she was cast after the design work was done.

There’s no Web of Lies Confidential so we don’t really know what the production process was like, but it’s fair to say not all of the animation works and in this case the “motion comic” label is designed to set the viewer up for something fairly rudimentary. It’s at about the level of the Shada remake with some moving parts, so although the rendering of the Cardiff characters is perfectly fine, the multiple facial expressions of Eve Myles captured, especially the one in which her eyeballs seem to envelop half of her face, their heads often wobble back and forth in a very curious manner like office toys.  The two or three frame style of walking will be familiar to fans of 8-bit computer games.

But like Shada and dozens of missing episode recons, it’s the performances and writing which generally carry things. Eve and Jack are at about the tone of Torchwood’s radio series and there’s a strange nostalgia to hearing them refer to absent friends even if the actuality of that old series, as we’ve noted in recent weeks, left a bit to be desired (a bit?). Dushku is a bit hesitant at first but soon the Faith/Tru/Echo paradigm kicks in and almost makes up for the lack of proper Torchwood action for her. The story resolution even seems to make sense of a section of the main series, although arguably it should have been up to the main series to do that. Presumably they decided it was already overburdened with stuff.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:13/31:What is your favourite building?

Guest answer by Ruth Moss (@smashpoetry).

When Stuart asked me to write a guest post on the subject of my favourite building I was stumped.

If he’d asked me about my favourite place, it would have been different. Ravenhead Greenway in St. Helens where I used to walk the dogs I used to have. Greenwich Park in London, where I’d go on early morning walks to shake off hangovers and comedowns, back in the early noughties. Abercromby Square in Liverpool, where I’d sit and read DH Lawrence novels, wearing a polo neck and drinking wine from a plastic cup. A farmer’s field in Newton-le-Willows where I once spent an afternoon with a pretty girl and a suitcase. The underneath of the stairs up to Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral where I once spent part of a night out with a handsome young man and … well, I’ll leave that there.

However, the question was about my favourite building, and not my favourite place.

I’m not especially well-travelled, and on the odd occasion I’ve been further than the UK I’ve been more interested in going on long walks and assessing the local landscape; when I’ve been indoors it’s been more for the content of the place (art galleries, museums, libraries) than the building itself.

I’m just not a building person; the only places I really enjoy spending long periods of time indoors are my house, and the houses of people with whom I enjoy spending time. It’s not that I’m unimpressed by great architecture; it’s just that I can’t fall in love with it in the way I can with the great outdoors.

However, I didn’t want to let Stuart down. At first, I thought that perhaps my own house is my favourite building; a simple two-bedroom mid-terrace in St Helens, but decorated throughout with vibrant matching colour pallets with bright bunting, various unusual car-boot finds and generally made to look cheerful and quirky without overstepping the line into tacky. I have, as one might say, made it my own; me and my son spend quite a bit of time there so it has to be a gorgeous place to live.

High ceilings, a faux-marble fireplace, steep stairs and a rickety old landing combine to make it architecturally interesting, if not high art. But as for it being my favourite building? I wasn’t sure. It felt like cheating.

It was only when I was on twitter, reading my stream, and saw a tweet from someone I follow, that I realised I do indeed have a favourite building. I’d forgotten about it, primarily because I don’t really think of it as a building as such; I’d categorise it more as a place, but still, it has walls, and foundations; bricks and mortar; it’s fairly old, too, and architecturally very interesting.

It doesn’t, however, have a roof.

It did once.

The tweet I saw was from @BombedOutChurch and was about something Urban Strawberry Lunch was putting on there.

My favourite building is St. Luke’s Church in Liverpool. It sits at the place where Bold Street turns into Hardman Street. Once a fully-functioning church, it’s now used by musicians, artists, CND campaigners, Yoga teachers, local characters and anyone in need of a bit of solace. Often, walking up Bold Street, music can be heard coming from inside the church drawing in interested passers-by.

Bombed in the Liverpool Blitz on 5^th May 1941, St. Luke’s suffered heavy damage; its roof entirely demolished but its walls and steeple miraculously left standing. Trees and plants now grow inside the church; strawberries and buddleja adorn brickwork and seats made of haystacks nestle in the grass for weary tourists or locals.

If I was a religious person, I’d imagine this as the perfect place to commune with God; a man-made building but a carpet of grass and a roof of sky; a perfect meeting of humans and creation. I’m not particularly religious, but it does seem to me at least serendipitous that enough of the church survived to turn it into what it is today; a calm, serene meeting place where people can come together with many differing ideas and share them in an atmosphere of peace, serenity and covered by a ceiling of clouds.

For me, too, it’s my perfect building. Not only is it beautiful (of course churches are beautiful; they were meant to impress peasants, like I would have been back then) but the inside is the outdoors.

You can find further information on the bombing of Liverpool here, further information on St. Luke’s Church here, Urban Strawberry Lunch’s website is here and twitter feed is here.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:12/31:Will the physical book become obsolete with the advances in technology? Could the same fate befall the physical act of love?

Question from Zoe Pattulo via Facebook.

Books However obsolete Google has now rendered most of my undergraduate degree in Information Studies, there were still plenty of lectures and seminars that in glancing forwards towards technological revolutions retained some of their resonance. Back in 1993 it seemed inconceivable that the internet would become so prevalent that it would effect our ability to retain knowledge causing us to rely on the devices at finger tips rather than the one which evolution has given us, yet here I am unable to remember the name of one my favourite actresses without recourse to the IMDb (it’s Barbara Stanwyck and now that I’ve typed it into something I might have a chance).

The other surprise, a few weeks into the Information and Society course was the death of the book, or at least a book made from wood pulp with physical pages. Even laptops at the time were hulking great big things and the idea that they’d become small enough to hold in the hand, something akin to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Star Trek’s PADD seemed, for obvious reasons, like science fiction. Apart from anything else, we were all still writing this down on a A4 refill pad with a biro. Laborious perhaps but why would anyone want to give up something that flexible, permanent and undeletable without recourse to whitner or a match?

We were even tasked with listing all of the reasons why books might survive and the cumulative list on the white board was about what you might expect. That paper books are tactile, easy to access, resilient, not as susceptible to technological failure, enjoyable to pick up in a book shop and smell excellent when brand new. That last one was probably mine. Especially glossy text books, particularly if they’re employing a heavy duty paper. Yum. Anyway we all looked at that list and decided that electronic books or whatever they’d be called might happen, but they’d be a niche item. People would still want books. Wouldn’t they?

Well, hum. From Alison Flood of The Guardian, Friday 12 August 2011, 14.36 BST: “Sales of adult fiction in hardback so far this year have fallen by over 10% according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan: by this point last year, sales of the format had reached £29.7m, while this year they stand at £26.6m. Cheaper paperback sales, in contrast, have only fallen 6%. Hardback sales have fallen in volume as well as value, BookScan said, from 2.8m copies sold by this point last year to 2.6m this, echoing a trend over the last two years: 8.5m copies of adult fiction hardbacks were sold in total in 2009, compared to just 7m in 2010.”

It’s the near death of physical books, people. Read the whole article and find quotes from various members of the trade commenting on how hardbacks are themselves becoming the niche, premium products with eBooks likely to continue to “cannibalise” their sales. But there are two details which you might have missed – I did first time around and which are relatively important for present purposes.  (1) “Cheaper paperback sales, in contrast, have only fallen 6%” and another which isn’t even mentioned but is very important – that (2) generally hardbacks and eBooks are published on the same day often months and months before the cheaper paperback.

That’s important, and here’s why. My Dad is big fan of historo-fantasy writer Diana Gabaldon and after hearing she had a new book out duly sent me to Amazon to see if it is available in paperback. His preference for paperbacks goes back to when he was working. They were easier to hold on the bus and even the doorsteps he reads took up less space in his bag and even now he finds hardbacks unwieldy to hold. Plus they’re cheaper. Amazon reveals the paperback isn’t published until 25th October 2012 but that the hardback is out this week. So after the usual sigh he handed me his credit card details and we ordered the larger edition.

The eBook edition is out the same day and I wondered what might have happened if he was still working and he had a Kindle. Would he have bought the eBook version. Having just asked him, he said he might, especially after I’d explained to him how a Kindle and the other readers that are available actually work. But what about the other commuters with small bags and far to go, and not wanting to carry around a hardback for the sake of reading whatever’s printed inside? Might not they also buy the eBook, especially if the alternative is waiting up to a year for the more portable option (with the exception of an audio version but let’s not go there)?

I’ve had a hunt around online and although I can’t find specific evidence of that, this page offers some kind of profile of an typical human eBook reader: “Your typical “e-book power buyer” (i.e. someone who buys at least one e-book every week) is an urban or suburban 30-44 year old with a full-time job. Next in line are 45-54 year olds, followed by 18-29 year olds. Not surprisingly, people in the 55+ age category buy the fewest e-books—at least, for now.” So actually the typical human eBook reader is exactly the kind of person who’d want a portable version of the book and perhaps has the disposable income to offset the loss of a physical item.


That release window has to be a sticking point. People have no patience, and why should they when media companies still attempt to impose artificial release windows which is presumably how a lot of people view this hardback/paperback gap. If through some bizarre set of circumstances, music publishers decided to attempt to save vinyl by delaying the release of cds and downloads for a year after the initial hotwax publication, the price of turntables would clearly increase, especially the ones which easily plug into PCs for the transformation into mp3s, crackle and hiss intact. It’s why the gap between theatrical and home release of films is ever narrowing.

It’s almost as though they want physical format sales to fail, and who could blame them? Even taking into account the environmental cost (as if that’s even an issue), there’s the whole process of printing and distributing paper books which is becoming ever more expensive thanks to the likes of fuel prices. Much easier to have the consumer effectively duplicate it themselves when they download. Plus, since the books can’t be resold or lent out easily (though libraries are trying their best even if they’re not going to be here much longer thanks to the drop in funding), readers are forced to buy brand new copies of everything, which is a major shift.

Now all we need to do is ask those young commuters if they’d buy the paperback instead if it was available on the same day. If they’re anything like me they’d still buy paper books. But then they’re not anything like me because I don’t have an eReader, will wait for a book to be published in paperback and don’t often read newly published books anyway, unless they feature a Time Lord in the lead role or is a four hundred year old play. The Caitlin Moran was my first in ages and I’m now deep into rediscovering the classics after deciding to collect the latest gorgeously designed edition of the Oxford World Classics.

Aha, and aha, what about Borders? What about all those US chains closing? What about the gloomy future of Waterstones and the independent book retailers? Some of that might have been about eBook sales, but it’s mostly because of people like me buying from Amazon and charity shops. Yes, but what about the death of the cd? Of vinyl? Isn’t that the same? That’s a portability issue too. Why lug around all those shiny discs when your mobile phone will play the same music. Oddly enough, I’ve gone back to my cd player because it’s more practical for listening to audiobooks because it allows you restart in the middle of a track and sentence.

All of which said, do I think the physical book will ever become obsolete with the advances in technology? Yes, probably, but it’ll take centuries, assuming we’re all still here. People just like paper books and it’s not until there are enough of us who’ve only ever been exposed to reading eBooks that there will be a change, the collective memory moves on, for the same reason I’m not scrawling this into a stone tablet or writing this on cloth. Apart from anything else, it’s a matter of usability. Hand someone a book and they immediately know what to do with it. Hand them an eBook reader and the learning curve begins.

The physical act of love, like the unexpected segway, will never be obsolete. This isn’t another topic discussed during my Information Studies course but there have certainly been enough films before and since which have tackled what a non-physical act of love would be like, usually involving virtual reality (The Lawnmower Man) or whatever the orgasmatron was (Sleeper). Or perhaps the question means in terms of onanistic pleasure thanks to electronic stimulation, either on a screen or in the hand, in which case you should never knock that sort of thing. To paraphrase Woody Allen in Annie Hall, it's sex with someone you love.

But to risk going a bit Swizz Tony from The Fast Show, we’ll never give up the physical act of love with (I’m assuming the question means) another person for much the same reason we can’t quit books. Because they’re tactile. Because they’re easy to access. Because they’re resilient. Because they’re not as susceptible to technological failure. Because they’re enjoyable to pick up in a book shop (not, let’s face it, I would know) and especially because they smell excellent when brand new. Well, alright, that’s stretching the metaphor a bit (a bit?) (bye, readers), but there’s no substitute for being with a person, especially someone you love.

Apparently.

What both questions really underscore is that people prefer the physical reality of things. Even eBook readers are things, even if we stop using paper for new releases, people will still have to hold something in their hands, just as people still want to hold people in their hands. Another way of interpreting the question could have been “will the physical act of reading become obsolete with the advances in technology?” but I still don’t think so. Film, television and theatre can offer unforgettable experiences, but as I’ve discovered myself in rediscovering reading there’s something very intimate about a book, an intimacy that is irreplaceable.

[Updated:  BBC's Imagine programme covered much the same topic tonight.  it's now available on the iPlayer.]

The Opinion Engine 2.0:11/31:What was the first album you bought and when and how? Listen to it again. How do you feel about it now?

Guest answer from Alison Gow.

Music When Stu asked me to write about the first album I bought my first thought was “Wow, it feels like yesterday”, and the second was “ohthankgodit’sacoolone”.

It would take a confessional journalist of Liz Jones proportions to get me to admit a Tight Fit first album purchase... luckily I can admit to it being Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, by David Bowie.

I had, of course, bought singles before - from the wonderful, cave-like Dale’s record store in Tenby’s Tudor Square. I was massively in awe of the imposing owner, Laurie Dale (dad of Charles the Corrie actor, fact fans), and fascinated by, and a bit scared of, the Iron Maiden album covers.

But an album was a big purchase for a nine-year-old - proper sums of cash were required for one, and also it was a commitment I didn’t feel ready to take.

Then my brother intervened.

Martin, four years older than me and the star of the local rugby and cricket teams, was cooler, more popular, and swore better, than anyone I knew.

Despite him warning me that when I started Big School I was not to tell anyone we were related, on pain of pain, and having once frightened me so badly by pretending to be a particularly dreaded Dr Who monster that I fainted, I idolised him.

His best mate had been given an album for his birthday he didn’t want, need or intend to keep and so was selling it.

My brother decided the person who should buy it was me - probably because he wanted it but wasn’t prepared to fork out - and so the pair of them proposed I should hand over some cash (I think it was £5) and in return I would be given music by someone I’d never heard of.

Astonishingly, I agreed and a couple of days later the album, with its weird cover art, was mine.

It was the most baffling, inexplicable thing I’d ever heard. Some of it was in Japanese - Japanese! - and it featured random swearing. I remember leaping, salmon-like, across the room to turn down the volume on It’s No Game Part II before my mum walked into my bedroom in time to hear someone sing the word ‘Shit’.

On a record player with built-in, tinny speakers, even the parts in English were hard to understand; ‘These pieces are broken’ became ‘these pieces of cocaine’ in my tuneless rendition for months... til I found the lyrics sheet, still inside the album cover.

I didn’t understand much of it but I absolutely loved that album. I loathed Fashion, with its nonsense “Beep Beep” refrain - it did ok in the charts - but that was the only track I’d skip.

I loved, loved, loved Scream Like a Baby - I had very vivid mental images of that song, probably informed by WWII films (it’s about political oppression so I was close, but no cigar) - but was baffled by Ashes to Ashes; all I knew was that it sounded terribly sad. My brother told me it was about a drug addict and hinted it was a sequel to an earlier song. My next trip to Dale’s saw me order a copy of Space Oddity (album) which earned me an approving nod off Mr Dale.

So, Stu asked me to listen to SMSC again for this blog post, and think about how it made me feel.

I have a digital copy now, of course, but I also still have my original, rather tatty album, which is as unscratched and loved as ever and it was that I dug out to replay.

Funnily enough, I hadn’t listened to it for years, digitally or otherwise so it was a rediscovery.

Even though I knew it was coming, the brash, shocking introduction still made me jump - all you hear are the crackles of the needle and vinyl, suddenly punctured by guitarist Fripp’s drawling chord on It’s No Game Part I.

What really struck me was how much of my childhood is tied to this album.

I didn’t just play it, I did what behaviourists term ‘active listening’ - questioning myself about how the songs made me feel, and what they brought back.

What I realised was something I hadn’t really thought about before - that this album, bought on a whim, really redefined my relationship with my brother.

We bonded over Bowie and, throughout our teen years when we behaved, at times, in pretty horrific ways towards one another, it was a common ground to which we could retreat.

We would discuss songs, the Bowie looks, have ‘what happened to his eye?’ conversations (pre-internet it was not easy to find out), compete for the best mix-tape, and go on buying sprees. Martin - with a job as glass collector in a local pub - earned more and bought the ‘rarities’ (imports and picture disks mainly) and I bought albums. I still have them; I can’t imagine what would make me part with them, even though all the tracks are on my iTunes.

So how did I feel when I listened to Scary Monsters for this blog? I felt grateful it had introduced me to Bowie’s amazing music, a little amazed at how well it had stood the test of time, and I felt a wave of affection for my big brother.

Because without him, this could have been 900-oddwords about Tight Fit.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:10/31:Can you truly love someone you have never met?

Question asked by Tonia via her friend on Facebook.

Life  Of all the questions I’ve been asked in this past couple of weeks, this is the one which has really caused me to stop and think. Not because I don’t have an answer. To save some time, my answer is no. What’s created the difficulty is how to frame that answer over five hundred or so words, because it’s also an answer for which the complexity is in the working out, and I didn't want the result to be covered in red pen.

So you’ll forgive me for dropping the artifice (assuming that dropping the artifice isn’t an artifice in and of itself) and structure and go with my gut (see what I mean?). What my gut says is that to an extent I don’t have the emotional maturity to really understand why. My lack of emotional maturity has become a useful prop when trying to explain why human beings are generally so awful to each other. I don’t understand because I don’t have the “emotional maturity”. But it’s true. For various reasons, I don’t.

It was much simpler for the pubescent version of me, the one who kissed his poster of late 80s Kylie each night before he went to bed, who compiled scrap books about the Minogue and in those pre-YouTube days filled VHS tapes with interviews and pop videos but who’d also travel one stop on the bus so that he could smile at the mysterious tall girl in the brown uniform so that she’s smile back when he alighted just outside his school, early enough that his friends wouldn’t see. He’d say, yes, yes you can.

Fiction also suggests that yes, it is indeed possible to truly love someone you’ve never met. Apart from courtly romance, there’s the famous scene in City Slickers, a film that is otherwise becoming increasingly relevant the older I become. It’s the famous “one thing” scene in which Jack Palance’s old cowboy Curly explains to Billy Crystal’s Mitch that the secret of life is the “one thing”, a “one thing” which is different for everybody.

But the earlier part of the scene, the preamble, is more pertinent here as Mitch asks Curly a question which is particularly pertinent.

Mitch: You ever been in love?
Curly: Once. I was driving a herd across the panhandle. Texas. Passed near this little dirt farm right about sundown. Out in the field was this young woman, working down in the dirt. Just about then she stood up to stretch her back. She was wearing a little cotton dress, and the settin' sun was right behind her, showing the shape that God had give her.
Mitch: What happened?
Curly: I just turned around and rode away.
Mitch: Why?
Curly: I figured it wasn't gonna get any better than that.
Mitch: But you could have been, you know...with her.
Curly: Been with lots of women.
Mitch: Yeah, but you know, she could have been the love of your life.
Curly: She is.

I’m thirty-seven now and know it’s not that simple.

For one thing in social networking, which I think is the context of this question, where the idea of meeting someone becomes more ambiguous, can you have “met” someone if it’s not in real life? Dictionary definitions suggest an acquaintance is enough and you can certainly become acquainted with someone via Twitter or Facebook. Many are the relationships and even marriages built on an initial web friendship, but have any of those people really been in love before they’ve met in real life?

I’ve "met" people online, perhaps even become a bit infatuated with them. But I don’t think I’ve ever been in love with any of them. For all the ways in which we’ve connected, I’ve always had the niggling suspicion that they could never be that perfect, moreover that the person I’m speaking to is unlikely to be the person I’d see in real life, largely because I’m sure, I think, the person typing these words he isn’t the person he is real life.  The people who have met me are best placed to judge that.

I have been in love. A lot. I don’t know if anyone’s ever loved me back, but there’s something I do know. That if there are any women I’ve truly loved, it was always because I’d become friends with them first. When I have been truly, madly, deeply, although they’ve been objectively attractive it’s not that which has made me love them. It’s been about how they’ve made me feel both while I was around them and all the seconds in-between.

Someone asked me recently if any of them where the love of my life. My answer was that I hoped not, because I knew they didn’t love me back, at least not that way, at least as far as I knew, and that would mean I’ve nothing to look forward to. But I’ve also been horrible at noticing the signs which explains the qualifications. If someone had loved me, truly loved, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:9/31:Weren't we happier before the internet?

Guest answer by Laura Brown.

Life Remember when you didn’t know what a trending topic was? Remember when students had to go to a proper library and research from proper books instead of just Googling their essay question? Think back to when that eejit you only send Christmas cards to out of guilt got in touch once a year and you weren’t forced to read their hilarious insights into how their pet pooch prefers mega chunk biscuits instead of petachunks, or whatever dogs eat.

Happy wasn’t it.

I for one was more productive before the Internet. Perhaps I should clarify, before the Internet stretched its malevolent hand over my world and cast a shadow over it. Granted, I was 18 before I sent an email. This is not because my parents likened internet usage to developing a healthy relationship with alcohol or casting a vote – although they probably should have done – but because it was 1998. Mobiles needed a bag of their own and everyone had pay as you go. You stayed in touch with people by, you know, talking to and seeing them. You shopped in proper shops. You read the news in newspapers. There were changes and technological wizardry yes. Instead of whirring and burring into life the super duper Nintendo had replaced the gigantic BBC computer in our living room. But life and the happy routine was much as they always had been. We did the shop on a Saturday. My dad rang his mother on a Sunday. I came home from school at 4.30 and proceeded to speak for at least to hour to every person of my gang.

It was content. It was ordered. It was safe.

It is no longer safe. Danger lurks behind every click. My day can be thrown into disarray by a simple status update. I now know my friends are pregnant because they tell me on Facebook. I read my news online with my netbook perched on my lap or squinting into my smartphone. I am contactable 24/7, and don’t my clients know it. I have developed a cramp from leaning over too small computers with too small screens in uncomfortable chairs. These are merely aesthetic concerns and selfish ones at that.

No my real concerns about the Internet and its effect on our general mood lie deep within its
underbelly. We are crueller online. We revert to childhood, taunting and teasing. The Internet, particularly comments boards and social networking sites have become one big playground where the school bullies have been replaced by the boy who can type the fastest or the articulate left-leaning journo with a sharp tongue. The weakest is anyone.

We have real double standards. We abhor right wing media from stitching up members of the public, yet we will gleefully mock their journalists and columnists. We don’t know how many have written the text that appears under their name or whether it has been modified by a sub editor. We don’t ask. We criticise not just their writing but their looks, their mental state, ability to procreate, the paternity of their mother and their relationship to various despots in history. And we do it in an instant, for laughs, with no remorse. There are no consequences online.

We do not have real relationships. On my first day of marriage, in between watching Liverpool lose to Arsenal, having a friend breakfast, looking moonily into my husband’s eyes, I told all my friends (many of whom had not been invites to said event) on Facebook. I cannot have been the only bride who considered it might reflect a real cut in cost to invite people via Facebook. There must be someone who has done it.

Look at the effect the Internet has had on our national media. How much is content about being a bastion of virtue or a chase to get hits, add comments, generate bitchy, trolling debate in a bid to get advertisers. The Mail Online is the most popular news site in the UK yet it can’t make a profit out of advertising. The Internet doesn’t make money. It might help you widen your business and it has created new jobs but it hasn’t been successfully monetised yet. How much of that is because of how we behave online?

Society never truly became free until we realised that we don’t have true freedom. Instead we have limits placed on our freedom and behaviour to ensure we can all have a reasonable level of liberty that doesn’t encroach on other people around us. Yes, I would like to slap the irritating woman next to me on the bus. But I could take a picture and tweet it. Isn’t that just as bad? As much as Paul McMullan might have taught us this year that privacy is only required by paedophiles (why is there no punctuation mark for ‘what the fuck’ by the way?) in fact it is one of the cornerstones of our freedom. Respecting eachother’s privacy and right to it is a bastion of our culture. Until we start adopting the same kind of rules online the Internet will make us worse not better. As #thewomanontheleft or Jemima Khan who was outed by an erroneous super injunction busting twitter feed as being Jeremy Clarkson’s mistress, when she wasn’t.

Online we behave as though we have no personal responsibility. It has become a mad, bad world of all that is wrong about how we communicate. Even Wikipedia has been bastardised by Bell Pottinger (yes, Ed, allegedly) There is no safe haven online. Until we recognise that the Internet needs to be an extension of our civilised society we will never really reap the benefit of it. Or perhaps a reflection is exactly what it has become and that’s why it feels so rotten to the core.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:8/31:Your thoughts on the Royal Wedding.

Question asked by @kariebookish.

History One of my favourite enclaves on-line, at least the most unusual, is the British Monarchy’s flickr feed. You may have seen examples posted on the blog, of princes and princesses pointing at food, of the Queen meeting actors. It’s a constantly updated visual record of the royal family at charity events, film premieres, factory visits and opening supermarkets. I look on with a sense of bemusement as what amounts the living embodiment of British history out in the world, greeting their subjects in 2011 like anachronistic time travellers, as contextually post-modern as seeing Wren’s churches overshadowed by the contemporary architecture that surrounds them.

If I’m a monarchist, it’s because of that. It’s because maintaining our royal family as is, with all its pomp and ceremony, its trials and tribulations, even its foibles, is as important as preserving and repairing the palaces they live in, the churches in which worship and the castles their ancestors once utilised to defend our land (with the help of several thousand commoners). Which is why I’m so excited about royal weddings and spend the day in front of the television absorbing every moment, the dress, the vows, the kiss, the honeymoon drive. Like every other hatch, match and dispatch at some point in the future, even after we’re gone, assuming the sun’s not burnt us to a crisp, books will be written, films made about their legacy.

The wedding in April was a near perfect expression of that. A couple so clearly in love and so nervous they didn’t know what to do with their hands during the ceremony. Their brother and sister openly flirting with one another suggesting another marriage might be in the offering soon (though it looks like Pippa has other plans). The rest of the family calcified in that way that royals tend to be, just now and then allowing the poignancy of the proceedings to break through in a grin or glint in the eye. Westminster Abbey, itself a storage device for so much of our history, data accessible by William and Kate should they need it, about failed marriages, poor reigns and the emotional wreckage of the past.

They’ve appeared in the flickr feed now too, but don’t yet have the curiosity factor when seen with members of the public and private sector, partly because they themselves are attempting to have something of a life outside the normal run of royalty, shopping in supermarkets and saving swimmers from certain death. They’re new builds, but as the world moves on, they too will need sustaining, but not yet, there’s plenty more charity events, film premieres, factory visits and supermarkets openings to come. And hopefully, even if the commonwealth crumbles, we’ll still have the will as a people to want them to continue in their present form so that our children can watch their children marry too.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:7/31:3D - do we actually need it this time around? And is it ever, EVER a good idea to convert a film into it?

Question asked by @Discodave75.

Film Usually when I’m asked for my opinion on 3D, a question which seems to crop up with a regularity second only to something Doctor Who related, I’ll usually say that film companies are desperate to find something to bring audiences back to cinemas and have fallen on the return of 3D with the same glee as sound, colour and letterbox. But that it would remain a gimmick until films are made whose stories or at the very least characters and themes are less comprehensible in 2D, just as some colour films are diminished in black and white, letterboxing is spoiled by cropping or panning and scanning and actually take advantage of format in the same way as sound, especially surround sound.

The problem has always been however that really all I’ve been doing is parroting out the views of Kermode, Ebert, Bordwell and a legion of internet commenters all of whom are firmly against 3D, essentially having, as some correspondents on This American Life suggested a couple of years ago, someone else’s argument. 3D to me has been either the two colour process, the experimental format employed for Doctor Who’s Dimensions In Time which required the camera to keep moving or in the present format an old style IMAX demonstration film from ten years ago and this admittedly positive Odeon preview of some trailers to really go on. I needed to see it employed in a narrative format at some point.

Which has meant, for the purposes of answering this question, I took a rare trip to the cinema this afternoon, to FACT Liverpool, for the 3D presentation of Martin Scorcese’s new film, Hugo. This wasn’t approached without some nerves. Thanks to so many horrible experiences with audiences, poor projection and immense ticket prices, I’ve gotten out of the habit of even attending the cinema, preferring instead the large television and comfy seating of my home, with the added plus of the pause button now that I’ve developed the bladder constitution of a pensioner at the age of thirty-seven. I’m pleased to report that this was an attentive albeit small audience, the film was beautifully projected and although the ticket price was £9, it included some reusable glasses.

The film itself is wonderful, magical and everything the less sniffy, more positive reviewers have led us to believe. The fictionalised story of an orphan who discovers the history of cinema and in particular pioneering director Georges Méliès in his bitter, penniless dotage working as a toy salesman in Montparnasse Station, it captures the magic of those earlier times through recreations of his film studio and working methods, as well as the simple pleasures of their stories through romances and chases in the station itself. Life affirming is a phrase ruined because of kitsch over-deployment, but in Scorsese’s love letter to the medium in which he's made his career, we’re reminded of cinema’s capacity to heal the soul.

All of which said, I’m disappointed to say that I’m not sure that any of those things wouldn’t be as true if I’d seen it in 2D. Hugo was shot using 3D cameras, and the director himself has also said that he’s still getting used to the format, suggesting it’s still in its infancy and should be judged as such. Certainly there’s a certainly breathless excitement as the camera cranes and zooms in and out of Hugo’s world, past trains (in homage to the early Lumiere film) and into the clock tower were he lives and hides, weaving between the cogs and mainsprings. Scorsese and his regular cinematographer Robert Richardson make full use of these new tools to dimensionalise the painterly Paris pioneered by Marcel Carné and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

But to some extent, as I expected, in the quieter moments, when the film isn’t putting images just in front of our faces, when two people are chatting in a room, I did wonder if I was tolerating the 3D, enjoying the film in spite of the format rather than because of it. Some of the most exciting moments are when clips are shown of  old films including the famous pink-tinted aerial shot of Babylon from Griffith’s Intolerance, during which I took my glasses of in order to marvel at them with my own eyes, especially since it’s the first time I’ve seen them projected at the intended scale with such a clean print. It’s not until you can see every figure on that ambitious set that you can fully understand the grandeur of what Griffith was trying to accomplish.

I'd also agree with Kermode et al, that 3D gives the image an extra layer of unreality beyond the CGI and artifice already inherent in cinema, thanks to how objects sit on the dimensional frame.  Some critics are suggested the effect is similar to a Viewmaster, in which figures seem rather flat, like cardboard creations in a child's table top theatre but the effect is also akin to the landscape sprites in early home computer racing games, just about acceptable as a car or in this case camera swoops past them, but without distractingly undimensional when caught with the corner of the eye.  Scorsese is also still employing focus with a two dimensional sensibility which means that very often an object fuzzily lurches out towards us drawing our vision away from the most important element of the shot.  Following the rapidly updating geography of the 3D picture is hard work.

There are also practical concerns. The glasses are uncomfortable and I spent most of the film fidgeting with them as they slide up and down my nose and made the side of my ears itchy. Although Scorsese makes it work to the film’s period, the glasses do make the image dimmer and the lenses were also reflecting visual information from behind and beside me, such as the light on the emergency exits. When instructed to put them on before the trailers, I also noticed a number thirteen floating in my peripheral vision. It wasn’t in any of the adverts and I feared I’d spend the whole of the film with it until I realised that the seat number had been screwed to the back of FACT’s comfy new seats. It went as soon as I hung my scarf over it.

All of which sadly confirmed everything I’d been hearing about the experience of watching a 3D film.  I am willing to admit that some of this might have to do with fulfilling pre-existing prejudices. Except, I’m a fan of cinema and was genuinely excited to see my first whole film in the format but there were just too many moments when I wanted to take the glasses off and simply watch the film without them, especially when shots were lost in a mist of hazing when the two images which make up the picture didn’t quite match (especially true of during one particularly important scene at the end). Scorsese’s tried his best, but the 3D’s distracting, the glasses are distracting and I can’t imagine why I’d ever want to go through this again.

So I’m back to watching everything in 2D again for a while. But 3D has changed the way films are constructed. Even when films are filmed flatly, it’s often with an eye to retrofitting which means the shot selection and pace of the thing changes. To some extent it’s helped action sequences especially amongst sympathetic directors and editors who seem pleased to be able to shift backwards from the punishingly fast shot durations which populated the thriller genre in the late noughties. But for technical reasons its also seen a vast increase in the medium close-up (heads and shoulders) and I do wonder if its had a knock on effect on tension in some character-based scenes. Would the Joker's interrogation in The Dark Knight have been as intense if shot for 3D?

When these films are retro-fitted such choices find their purpose, except if Hugo presents what a great director working at the top of his game with cutting edge technology achieves, I really hate to think what some of these faux-D films must look like. Hugo also highlights how Méliès himself indulged in a primitive form of retrofitting, shooting Le Voyage dans la Lune in black and white before hand-painting each frame in colour as part of his post-production process. Is this any different? Perhaps it isn’t. But having seen plenty of 2D presentations of these films over the past twelve months I can’t think of one which would have been benefited by an extra dimension, or at least may have become more entertaining.

But Méliès thought that by adding colour to his films, however crudely, he would enhance the magic of them and that’s been Scorsese’s thought in producing Hugo with the latest technology. But each time one of his directorial ancestors films appeared all I could think was how the Frenchman was able to produce what were then and are still visionary works in two-dimensions and how, in the few moments when that work is also retro-fitted during this work, it detracts from his achievement. Ultimately, then, from my meagre experience, I don’t think we need this form of 3D right now. Which isn’t to say when the technology moves on and we can watch them without glasses as has been hinted, my opinion won’t change.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:6/31:We look forward to receiving your (Doctor Who) reviews.

Review copies sent by AudioGo.

Books Despite the casting notice on the inlay, neither the synopses or indeed the cover of this month’s Doctor Who Magazine are backwards in coming sideways on the casting coup at the heart of this final two part chunk of Doctor Who’s Serpent Crest, David Troughton putting in an appearance as Doctor 2 and lending his interpretation of his father’s performance previously heard in audio books. Sure enough, he’s uncanny, especially when articulating Second’s catchphrases, his "oh dears" or "giddy aunts" and for the most part entirely respectful to his father’s work and there are moments, especially with Mrs Wibbsey then Mike Yates narrating each episode, that we could be listening one of the missing episode releases (after Mark Ayres has pulled a few all nighters to remove the static and sound of someone having their dinner in the background).

But Tom Baker still stars as teeth and curls and this is the resolution of a five parter which bewilderingly had seemed like it was resolved after just three, with Alex returned to take up his princely place in the Robotov Empire and the Fourth Doctor heading back off into the time vortex. The Hexford Invasion picks up months later with Wibbs ensconced in village life, suspicious of the next door neighbour’s bee hives and nauseated by a novelist who’s moved into Hexford and become fast friends with everyone. This is Paul Magrys channelling Posy Simmons, employing Wibbs’s acerbic wit to comment on the boredom of life after the Doctor. But it’s not long before UNIT, led by a re-commissioned Mike and Doctor 2 roll into town, set up shop in Nest Cottage and the usual shenanigans ensue.

The Hexford Invasion then becomes a Pertweean village caper from the point of view of the citizens, their tranquil yet sinister life disrupted by these army men and their befuddled, hoboish friend. Wibbs doesn’t like or trust Doctor 2, he’s not her Doctor and seeing him through her eyes, neither do we. When Tom finally arrives, of course we look forward to how the two men connect (having missed each other in The Five Doctors) and sure enough there’s some magic, as the play becomes a kind of Time Lord Spy Vs. Spy, as they each attempt to discover the motives of the other, Fourth not remembering anything which is happening, no Time Crash informed bootstrap paradoxes here thanks to a veiled reference to Season 6b. I won’t spoil things, but it’s safe to say this isn’t a “you were my Doctor” weep fest.

It’s also barely a spoiler to say that the alien hoards massing above the village are the Skishtari seeking the egg which was buried at the close of Aladdin Night though to say much about their methodology would be, so I’d stop reading here if you don’t want to know the score.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:5/31:Do you agree with Tennyson, that "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all"?

 Guest answer by Alynn Gibson.

Life  My grandmother passed away in July after a long decline due to a dementia that robbed her of her physical vitality and her mental acuity. We had a difficult relationship, she and I, over the last six years of her life, years in which my parents and I worked to take care of her. She was difficult and emotionally distant when I was a child; in my adulthood, as she declined into dementia, she somehow became more difficult and more distant, but she also became increasingly detached from reality, which made her difficult to relate to. I had been expecting the end for six months, but when the end finally came I realized how wrong I had been the previous months in thinking the end was near; the final week of her life, her final decline, were noticeably different as her body and her mind shut down.

I thought, before she passed, that I wouldn't really mourn her -- in many ways, I'd been mourning her for years, because her dementia had turned her into someone that looked like my grandmother in body but didn't resemble her at all in mind; in other ways, I knew death would be a release for her -- but the truth is I was devastated. I sat on the stairs. I didn't just weep, I howled. My father asked me to call my siblings to let them know she was gone, and I couldn't make it through any of the conversations without breaking down. My mother asked me to say a few words at the memorial service, and despite thinking I would be fine, I had another meltdown at the podium. Despite living daily for six years with the knowledge of my grandmother's mortality, I hadn't emotionally processed it. I hadn't mourned her the way I told myself I had. As difficult as my relationship was with her, as distant as she so often was, I loved my grandmother and I was hurt that she was gone.

In my teenage years and in my twenties, my relationship with my grandparents was not close because, like a teenager, I didn't need them, I didn't relate to them, and they weren't interesting to me. When my grandfather passed away, the day Star Wars Episode I opened, I was hurt and I was sad, but it was a distant kind of hurt. In the subsequent decade, I grew up, and I grew into a person who would have appreciated his grandfather more. There are things I want to know from him today that I didn't want to know fifteen years ago. I want to know about his father Allyn, the name whose name I carry. I want to know what drew my grandfather to my grandmother when they met in the years before Pearl Harbor. I want to know what my grandfather's service in World War II, as part of the Navy's ballooning corps, was like. I want to know what my grandfather's hopes and dreams were, I want to know which dreams went unfulfilled, I want to know which dreams came true. My mother knows some of the answers, but she knows them as stories. My grandmother knew many of the answers, but her dementia robbed her of them. I knew my grandfather, I even loved him, but I knew and loved him as a kindly elderly man. Today, I wish I had known him as a person. Fifteen years ago, I was not the person who would have wanted to know these things, who would have wanted a deep and meaningful relationship with him. Today, even five years ago, I want to know all of these things -- and the sad truth is that I'll never have the answers.

One of the English language's great poems, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memorium, A.A.H.," wrestles with the same problems -- of death, of loss and regret, of mourning and coping. Its two most famous lines -- "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." -- are invariably quoted out of context today, given the gloss of romantic loss. Tennyson, however, meant the lines to be more universal; the poem as a whole was written over the span of nearly two decades as his reaction to and working through his grief for the sudden death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, and these two lines speak to Tennyson's belief that the grief one feels at the loss of a meaningful relationship, such as the one he had with Hallam, meant that one has lived and that one is still alive. Grief is a sign that we have had friends, that we have let others touch our lives, that we have touched the lives of others. Grief means that we feel, grief means that we have loved, and there is far more to love than the romantic. A life bereft of grief over its span is a life bereft of love.

I loved my grandmother. I knew her, she touched my life, however distant we may have been over the years, however frustrated I may have felt by her dementia. I wish at times I could have known her better. I wish often I could have known her husband better. I wish I hadn't pushed them away like a teenager. I wish I had worked harder to know them as people when it mattered. But I didn't, and even though I've grieved for them and mourned for them, I have regrets, and I will always have regrets. That's Tennyson's message in his oft-quoted couplet -- grief is always better than the regrets.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:4/31:What's your opinion of Zooey Deschanel?

Question asked by Annette of Annette's Notebook.

“One day, you’ll be cool.”

Film & Music  The first time I really noticed Zooey Deschanel, though in truth it felt like she'd noticed me, was near the beginning of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, in which she plays Anita, the rebellious big sister of William, Crowe’s avatar in this autobiographical piece.   She was leaving home to become an airline stewardess and before toddling off around the world she said goodbye to her little brother and as ever Crowe employed a point of view shot because he wanted us to see the world through William's innocent perception.

As she loomed over her brother, she looked directly at us and although the effect of this is lost even on the biggest television, in the cinema on a massive screen, we were collectively hypnotised by her saucer like blue eyes. I’ve never been cool, never will be cool, but when she said, “One day, you’ll be cool", a decade ago, I could well believe it and watching again for the purposes of taking the not quite convincing low angle shot reproduced above for illustrative purposes, I believed it again.

That single moment probably defines her entire career, the girl who makes you feel cool.  She does it again in the disappointing film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy which despite the best efforts of Stephen Fry as the book, is an abomination, but offers the best of the Trillians, which isn’t hard because (a) Douglas Adams himself had admitted that he always underwrote her in the early stories and (b) because Zooey steals every scene she's in, even when acting opposite a hypertensive Sam Rockwell as Zaphod.

She is understated. Human. Even more so than Martin Freeman whose main crime is not being Simon Jones, which is odd because Zooey is neither Susan Sheridan or Sandra Dickinson.  But unlike either of those her Trillian seems like someone you could meet at a party, fall for, but who'll ultimate leave with some other, spacey guy, unless she's in the mood to make you think better of yourself, work through your low-self esteem and, yes, one day make you cool. 

It took a few more years before someone neatly defined that special quality, the manic pixie dream girl. Since being coined by Nathan Rabin at The AV Club, it’s become the key discoursal phrase when describing the girl who saunters into a rather straight protagonist’s life and shakes it up, the kind of figure Arthur Dent epitomises even if the weird meta-narrative he's trapped in has other plans. Not every role. You could argue against Anita and certainly Alma in The Happening barely qualifies (a film which we’ll return to),

But in Elf, Yes Man and 500 Days of Summer and countless others, she’s the slightly quirky, bo-ho figure, usually with an ability to sing who causes some male to look again at their life and find it wanting. But unlike other MPDGs, the Kirsten Dunsts or Natalie Portmans who’re acting the role, and despite having not appeared in Rabin's original list, Zooey embodies it and when in the above examples she's not offering the smirk of giddy tolerance every five minutes, she's working against her natural tendencies.

From what I’ve seen of her television series New Girl (which is admittedly not much), it’s also a continuation of all that tone. You know what you’re going to get from a Zooey Deschanel performance which is really quite comforting. We expect musicians or directors to keep within their own style, with one or two exceptions, so why should we expect anything more or less from an actor? She’s the master of the precise thing she does and projects have probably suffered when she's trying other things.

All very old Hollywood and it continues into real life (or the version of real life that's filter through gossip blogs).  Recording the soundtrack album to Winnie the Pooh is a very MPDG thing to do, as is wearing vintage clothes, co-owning a lifestyle website called Hello Giggles and marrying the lead vocalist from a mid-level band like Death Cab for Cutie, presumably breaking the heart of some other bloke close to hand, before perhaps breaking his heart too.

Not that she’s the reason to watch every film. As with everyone else involved, The Happening almost ended her career, though I still argue that even if you disagree with intent, “Night” directed the actors to “do it that way” so they can’t really be held responsible (not that admittedly “following orders” isn’t a recipe for trouble).  Most recently she was wasted in Your Highness (incidentally with Portman), a film which only seems to work if you’re the breed of person who thinks Danny McBride is the comic genius he isn’t.

Zooey’s musical career has happily been more adorable. As one half of She & Him, M. Ward being the Him, she’s produced the musical equivalent of her fashions, recalling the vintage tones of the 40s and 50s but with a modern twist. The original material was summed up well by Pitchfork in an interview when they suggested “listening to your lyrics I sometimes feel like a big sister is giving me advice” (bringing us back to Almost Famous).

The cover versions are something else, amongst other things recapturing Gonna Get Along Without You Now from a myriad tonally incorrect disco versions though somehow also influenced by the rendition on Laverne and Shirley Sing. Yes, that Laverne and Shirley.  Their new acoustic Christmas disc is right on form, with almost minimalist accompaniment to old faithfuls like Have Yourself a Merry Christmas, the art redolent of dime store LPs from the 1950s.

In other words, my opinion of Zooey Deschanel is that she’s adorable and just the big sister I would have wanted growing up if I hadn’t been an only child and far younger than I am now. I appreciate she’s not to everyone’s taste, the reaction to her singing of the US national anthem proved that, but I’m yet to particularly find a flaw. Anyone who can be plagued by her similarity to some new singer who’s just turned up yet still agree to appear in a photograph with her has to be a bit funny and they’re the kinds of people I tend to like.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:3/31:Which writers are you most influenced by?

Question asked by Graham Kibble-White of TV Cream.

Life Is it possible to have a favourite writer who doesn't influence your own writing? Given how many authors have their own definitive style yet enjoy the work of others, sometimes in entirely different genres, then it must be. But perhaps, "influence" doesn't just mean in terms of style but on a more fundamental level, in relation to structure or world view. In attempting to list which writers have influenced me, I've come to the conclusion that the distinction isn't as clear, that I don't have a particularly distinctive style anyway.

Some of that has to do with never really receiving formal training, if such a thing exists. At school, GCSE English Language consisted of endless assignments, fiction, but sometimes essays, each of which would be returned with red pen comments like “this needs more work” or “your argument is unclear” but I was too busy thinking about teenage things to really ask the relevant teacher what that meant. Then there wasn't an option for that subject in A-Level, just literature and after struggling through Beckett, Woolf and Chaucer for two years, I failed the course.

Which means that my ability to write, assuming I have an ability to write, has been entirely informal, that the people who've "influenced" me, have most likely taught me how to structure such things as paragraphs and sentences, but through the same process had led to the picking up of many bad habits, like sentences which seem to carry on endlessly, with comma, after comma, until they fill nearly the whole paragraph. But not to mention the seeming need to make those paragraphs have the same number of lines. That one's mine.

My primary source I’m unashamed to say is The Guardian and the writers thereof. I’ve been reading The Guardian since the mid-nineties and when I was scratching around attempting to work out how “proper” writing should sound and be, I decided The Guardian style was the thing to mimic even to the point of reading their style guide. That was certainly the case when I began writing this blog and probably still is even if my largely monosyllabic vocabulary isn’t always up to the task.

If you’re interested in specific writers on the paper, it’s who you might the expect, the Brookers, Hydes and Freemans even if I’m too embarrassed to be quite that acerbic. I was a big fan of Anna Pickard’s television writing back in the day, and Jon Ronson’s reportage has been instrumental in suggesting how to find the core of what’s happening whilst still illuminating through personal response. Elizabeth Day’s columns and interviews are also particularly fine.  Yes, if I've any ambition it's to have something professionally published in that paper.

Except I’m aware that my writing can be too discursive, too unruly for that and I think I can blame Douglas Adams for wanting to break off in the middle of one thing to talk about something else, deciding on what should be the right structure then ignoring it, finding myself in the middle of writing about one thing, when I should be typing away about something else, even ignoring what few rules I have cultivated. If not his actual writing, I certainly have his annoying writer’s block, though no one has yet had to lock me in a hotel room to finish anything because of a missed deadline. I’ve always hit my deadlines.  I think.

Elizabeth Wurtzel taught me how to be personal, or at least pointed me in that direction. Mark Kermode writes, but it’s listening to his Radio 5 show that I’ve seen the allure of being unafraid to forthright and dogmatic in my beliefs. David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Roger Ebert show how it’s possible to be clever, accessible and yet also structural and I wish I had more of an ability for that. Numerous blogs. Perhaps since all of my writing is blogging right now, I’m mostly influenced by bloggers.

Then there’s Shakespeare. I appreciate it takes a certain particular hubris to specifically suggest Shakespeare as an influence, but if I’ve learnt anything from him, it’s that English isn't static. Grammar, spelling and punctuation should be malleable, manipulatable especially if using the wrong word in the right place has thematic resonance, helps an argument or is just funny. Many are the occasions when I’ve been pulled up on what looks like a grammatical error, a typo or poor spelling which I’ve done on purpose to make a point. Perhaps I’m just not very good at it. Perhaps that's why he's a genius and I'm not.

It would also be remiss of me not to mention (embarass) the person asking this question and some of the other people looking at this very blog post who contributed to the Off The Telly website, which demonstrated how it was possible to write knowledgably and thoughtfully about television and although I’ve said this before, it’s still true, that whole project, however rare I contributed myself, was instrumental in me returning to university for my MA Screen Studies, not least because my portfolio included one of the few pieces I did contribute.

But Graham continues to be an influence on my Doctor Who reviews, as does his colleague at Doctor Who Magazine Gary Gillatt, that being the first section I read each month, always feeling slightly let down when their by-line doesn’t occur. Also the old crowd from Behind The Sofa, Neil, John, Damon, Frank, Sean, Dave and everyone else, all the reasons I tried to get my review in first on a broadcast night because I knew they’d be on my tail with greater style and honesty in the hopes it’d look like they were copying me rather than the other way around.

This is the kind of piece which doesn’t really have an ending, so I’d be interested to know who you think my writing is influenced by, if I’m deluding myself with some of persons above (Shakespeare) and who you think I should be reading. Any influences become more or less apparent depending on the kinds of writing I’m attempting and no matter how much I try to make everything sound the same, there are still moments when I begin one type of writing in the wrong voice and everything goes catastrophically wrong. I wonder why?

The Opinion Engine 2.0:2/31:Your thoughts on where social media is heading (I keep asking you this).

Question asked by @kariebookish via Twitter.

Hello everyone. This Ignite talk is going to be about the future of social media.

Sorry, um, ah, I'll waiting for the first slide.

Right.

The short answer is, I don’t know.

Having been thinking around the subject for days, whole bit of speech which you’ll never hear, trying to develop a satisfactory answer, I’ve decided that I simply can’t.

The reasons are relatively simple.

For one thing, social media is one of those concepts or subjects which lacks a clear definition.

We clearly mean Twitter and Facebook and before that myspace, Bebo and Friends Reunited. But do we mean The Well bulletin boards in San Francisco during the 1980s? What about Empire Magazine’s comment sections in 1995 which was my first experience? What about Metafilter, or Yahoo! Groups, ICQ or Chatylist all of which I’ve used since?

Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet shows, social media began even earlier than that with the telegraph, with marriages even being conducted over morse code.

And what of smoke signals? Don’t they also count?

Of course they do. A glance at the Wikipedia, itself a form of social media, demonstrates that the definition is so loose as to include anything on-line that isn’t a static web page and even then arguably that’s a form of social media because it’s about communicating.

But also, unlike so many other things, it’s impossible to really forecast exactly what new bit of software or platform might develop to improve on what we have now just as when we all thought email was a panacea and little realised that however instantaneous that seemed there’d something even quicker.

Incidentally, um, next slide, email’s gone soon, I suspect. There are plenty of mailshots from companies, but usually that’s because those websites don’t have an RSS feed or their Facebook has a high noise ratio, posting the same topic six times a day.

In the future there will be new platforms, and social media applications will become even further integrated into software and hardware, but it genuinely feels as though we’ve reached a plateau in development terms, with Twitter and Facebook straddling simpler and more complex tastes.

Except it felt like that five years ago when blogging was everything.

In which case we have look at this question from an application perspective. How will we use social media in the future?

At 13:57 on the 1st December 2011, @thejimsmith tweeted: “Oh! People who think twitter is for conversation rather than screaming into the void. Bless.” Which is true.

Sometimes I’ll be tweeting for hours without a single reply hoping that whatever I’ve said is of such scintillating validity it requires no comment but knowing it’s simply that I’m creating just a lot of noise in someone’s follower list.

But the day before, I had a very long, useful conversation with @doublenagativeL about the Liverpool Biennial, one of hundreds across the years since I’ve been using Twitter, often with people who are near or total strangers.

The tone has been different every time, and there’s always the block button if I want to cut someone off.

There’ll be much more of both. Much more.

I’ve also stopped using the telephone socially too. Some recent chaos meant I had to have long conversations with friends and I was surprised at how difficult it was to anticipate when the next person was ready to speak, outside of the professional environment where I use the phone all of the time and the structures are more rigid.

Customer service is still in its infancy on social media but I could imagine it becoming more crucial. Increasingly, problems which I’ve not been able to resolve through normal channels have been easily dealt with through the Twitter account of the relevant company, M&S agreeing to send Mum a gift voucher because her Mother’s Day daffodils failed to open.

This will increasingly become the way companies interact with their costumers or as they’ll soon be called, users, and they’ll realise that the best feeds are those which sound as though they have passionate human being behind their corporate avatar rather than automatically simply linking to press releases.

Such things are expensive, but there’s a real benefit to having a dedicated Twitter user rather than someone who does social media on top of their other work, though it’s surprising how rarely such jobs are advertised. They’re usually still crouched in terms like “marketing” which they are but the skill set isn’t quite the same.

Search and other data applications will also become increasingly important. In Jan 2009, every search result on Google was advised as being harmful. My first thought was that it might be a virus. My second was to search Twitter and sure enough the entire planet was witnessing the same phenomena. The Googleplex was confused and Twitter also eventually let me know that the outrage had been resolved.

Oh I'm running out of time. Erm ...

Contexts will improve! Search for Liverpool on Twitter and the results are swamped with football related tweets. It’s possible to filter those out with carefully chosen terms but perhaps in the future you’ll be able to tell whatever that you don’t like football and it’ll do the job for you.

The data Twitter supplies is also being used by companies to test products, a massive, passive focus group able to provide instant reviews of anything from food to television programmes, something networks are discovering to their cost as they can watch the project they’ve nurtured over months being destroyed within a few minutes.

But similarly, this instant consensus allows us consumers base our choices somewhat on other people’s experiences. Not that we should become too carried away. We’ll still need experts. I think. I hope.

None of which wasn’t impossible before. It’s just that Twitter, Facebook and the rest make it much easier.

Like I said, there’ll be new platforms, new technologies.

Smart phones will become cheaper, data too, so within five or ten years or even sooner, everyone will have one, even me, with all the knock on social effects, positive and negative and it’ll be increasingly difficult not to be wired in making speculative fiction of the past look positively anachronistic.

None of which should at all be seen as me giving a definitive answer. Because I don’t have one. I simply don’t know.

But luckily I'm out of time. Thank you.

[Disclaimer: This is an imaginary talk in homage to the sterling work of those who were brave enough to speak at last night's Ignite 8 in Liverpool].