Just watch this. And then, you know, never be able to sleep again.

I've just had Barclaycard's online insecurity check decide I'm not me... while listening to John Finnemore's sketch about credit card security codes.

I hate reality. At least John's world has jokes.

Some people may have previously been aware of Heil Honey, I'm Home, a 1990 British sitcom cancelled - for some reason - after only one episode. Apparently it helps to know that it's satirising 1930s politics within the context of a parody of US 1950s sitcoms...

In a lengthy panegyric on the joys of bacon, this:

I’m glad that fairy tales don’t use bacon as a force for bad.

God, now I'm hungry.

Hulu is a new (ish) service intended to bring the best content for you, to you, on the web. I've always been slightly surprised no one's come anywhere close to doing this right yet (there are a few competitors, most of which seem to be very shiny but I haven't actually seen achieve very much), but honestly the most surprising thing on the Hulu site is where they categorise Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a "TV classic".

So Zhura are the second screenwriting-software-for-free-online to pop up recently (and the first which doesn't require you to be in the US or Canada - because obviously screenplays don't travel well over the internet if they stray too far from Hollywood). Go there. Watch the little video.

Oh.

My.

Seriously, there's a video of two people each trying to write a screenplay, who give up and shred their work, only to run into each other in what we could charitably call a hallway but is clearly just the bit of landing between their two bedrooms. They realise that putting their two efforts together they can create a jim dandy screenplay. Or at least one page of one. It's unclear what their original problems were (I think they were just using the wrong colour paper), but obviously working together helped them resolve those niggling difficulties and lack of overall talent. Voila: screenplay!

Zhura are focussed on collaboration, so you put up your idea, screenplay, whatever, and license it so that other people can contribute. Obviously you all retain copyright for whatever work you do on it, which will just make it pretty much impossible that anybody would ever actually pay for it (also I suspect WGA arbitration is gonna kick in automatically if you even mention Zhura in future).

None of this bothers me, really, since I'm just looking for an easy way to type up scripts. It doesn't seem too bad, although the formatting options are limited, but the idea's good and it's easy to use. Of course I didn't entrust anything I actually care about to it - so I gave up after two scenes based on an idea I pretty much typed in without thinking. I've made the idea public, in the hope that it will appeal to writers who don't have any talent, thus thinning the gene pool somewhat. It's called "Agent Elsie", and the pitch is:

Elsie is a fourth grade teacher. While sitting at home one night thinking up ideas for a class history project, she is visited by the shadowy Colonel Raven, who says that the military needs her help. He is killed before he can explain all the details, prompting Elsie to run from his killers, to Fort Lauderdale, discovering along the way secrets about her family and upbringing that she had never considered.

It is quite possibly the worst idea I've ever had. Think of it as Private Benjamin meets The Long Kiss Goodnight. Or The Shadow Men meets the last scene of Out of Mind, Out of Sight. In an alternate universe where the US military conducts all its secret operations in Miami.

So expect to see it at a multiplex near you in summer 2009.

Real pirates carry cutlasses. (Via Bruce Schneier.)

Thank you to all the people who suggested I watch the opener for the new series of Torchwood. It was unmitigated crap, and quite possibly the worst writing I've seen in years. Feeble jokes, sex references without any sexual tension, and isn't science fiction supposed to be at least tenuously based in, you know, science? It's entirely possible to believe that Chris Chibnall was born in the 1550s, and has never heard of Francis Bacon. The US is producing precisely nothing, and this is all the BBC can come up with?

If the BBC really wants to make it better (and I doubt they do, or they'd have fired the entire writing team from last year, and quite possibly shot half the cast for good measure), they should send Jack Harkness into a black hole (with a copy of Spartacus on a portable DVD player so that, relativistically at least, he'll be watching it for an eternity), and have the rest of the Torchwood team eaten by something large and slimey, before having a look at one of the other Torchwood centres, in the hope that they're more interesting. And they could transfer PC Andy to work there because, you know, the world can never have enough of Tom Price (no, not that Tom Price).

That's 45 minutes I'll never get back. Plus nearly half an hour to get all the IMDb references right. And this blog entry would have made a better episode. Cast James Marsters as the narrator.