Talk To Rex

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.

How wonderful to see that the narrow-minded, ill-informed and opportunistic knee-jerk reactionaries laying into Dr Rowan Williams over his comments on Sharia law have got themselves a perfect figurehead.

Just occasionally, browsing somebody else’s bookshelf yields the solution to a seemingly impossible conundrum.

In this case, “crikey, this Church Pocket Guide is just so dashed inpenetrable, how on earth do I even begin to read it?”

Dear Jose Beal,

No, I have never been “ashamed of the size of my dick”. How did you get my email address?

I do not want any of your products. If you happen to be in touch with Roberto Milligan, Yvonne Ratcliffe, Sharlene Foote, Mrs Heather Pryke, Cole Shultz, Bernice Hollis, Lilly Ash, Cynthia Grace, Lori Kearney, Anura Lloyd or Trudy Trotter, I wonder if you might pass on the same message to them as well.

Cheers,

James

Real pirates carry cutlasses. (Via Bruce Schneier.)

During a visit to Kew at the weekend, I was disturbed to notice that terrorists appeared to have gained control of the London Underground’s announcement boards to issue threats regarding a (presumably unsuccessful) planned attack:

After much inner struggle on the need vs bank balance front, I have finally bitten the bullet and bought a new computer. And it is already a quantifiably successful investment, as I have spent no time over the last couple of days waiting for my computer to stop crashing. (Of course, the many hours this has saved me I have frittered away playing with the exciting nobbly bits on Windows Vista and ringing up PCWorld to try to get them to send me the things they forgot to put in the box, but in theory I’ll eventually get down to work with, like, 200% more efficiency.)

The best bit, though, is this: to get into my user account I don’t need a password. Oh no.

My computer does a fingerprint scan.

This is totally unnecessary and absolutely thrilling. Logging on to check my emails is like entering a secret base in a James Bond film.

Well, maybe not exactly like that, but it certainly makes Torchwood seem pretty cheap and lacklustre. Oh, hang on…