I Want to Flee the Sinking Ship Britannia

I haven’t made headway on anything this week, and I’m stuck away from everything important for at least another day or two. I am a hamster on a treadmill, forever rushing yet getting nowhere fast. The universe has a completely perverted sense of humor, and these reminders that anything I attempt will be met with equal and opposite resistance are starting to be extremely irritating.

Not only am I minus transport which I was counting on, nearly everyone I need to talk to is MIA – which, under any other circumstances, wouldn’t be an issue, but when I’m throwing every penny I have at attempting to get things done… Frustrating as mass disappearances are, and being yachtless is, of slightly more concern is how much money each setback costs me. I’m terrified of having to use my card all the time (and, y’know, thanks to whoever emptied out all the cash machines – great thinking there) as it doesn’t feel like real money. I use the card without thinking, and as I barely look at statements I have no idea how much I’ve spent this month already.

The reason that I prefer cash, as in physical money, is that I can work out – from what remains – how much I’m allowed to spend in the remainder of the month without feeling guilty. At this rate I have zero knowledge of where I stand on that front. And no, don’t even bother saying “you can check your balance online,” as the banks have seen to it that their websites are so horribly broken that doing anything on them is absolute torture. Having to input security codes every three minutes might be fun and exciting for some, but its a bloody chore, and that’s with the “remember me” button selected.

One of the major problems with me being left to my own devices, with all meetings seemingly canceled on me, is that I have time to browse. This is dangerous. Today (Saturday) alone I have seen three modern firsts crying out for someone to care for them, and there’s a fairly substantial number of weird paranormal books from the seventies and eighties calling out to me. Under other circumstances I would already have buckled, but keeping at least some semblance of a budget has to come first. A couple of old magazines were all I dared purchase (only eight quid apiece), and even that has given me the guilts.

Whenever things get this annoying, and hoo-boy things are so annoying right now, I get to wondering how Britain must look to the rest of the world. When we broke away from Europe did we officially change the country’s slogan to “ambitious but rubbish?” Everywhere seems to be closed up, even when I’ve specifically booked an appointment… I’m getting to the point where I’m ready to bloody well swim to mainland Europe. Maybe that’s the reason for my compulsive exercising – I’ve already subconsciously decided on a plan of action, or something.

There’s so much melodrama around at the moment that actual, proper drama is far preferable. While I appreciate that people have a natural instinct to panic, emptying out shelves from shops, nabbing all the money from cash machines, and generally going full Prepper on the world, there really isn’t a massive chance of any individual catching Captain Trips. You are more likely to get hit by a bus, or fall down a flight of stairs, or be poisoned by your underpants, or… IDK, be murdered by an Elvis impersonator or something.

Focusing on some hypothetical danger isn’t the best use of anyone’s energy, and only by continuing to follow routine can we get through this madness with as little interruption as possible.

But no. People want to flail and moan, and act as if the sky is falling.

I was going to list everything I still needed to pick up, but as I made my way through endless requirements it became more depressing than anything else. On my travels I discovered a little art shop, one of those independent ones the kind of which used to be everywhere, and it had an absolutely gorgeous little wooden box full of sable brushes on sale. I very nearly splashed out three hundred quid on it, my card tantalizingly close to hand, before I remembered that the plan was to get a camera before anything else. If it is still there the next time I pass through this way I’m going to treat myself.

The specific camera is still an unknown. I want a Red, but dropping twenty grand on an unknown quantity is fucking scary. It many not be much to some, but this is a lot to spend for me at the moment. It isn’t so much money which is playing on my mind, but rather image quality – the first thing I want to do when everything I need is in the can is to find a small cinema somewhere to see all my raw footage on a large screen, then proceed from there. Not knowing exactly what to expect from various makes and models is a massive leap into the unknown, but I can’t go back to using video. Seriously, anything but video… I’ll use one of those Fisher-Price toy cameras before resorting to video.

While I could live with something that looked okay, I want footage slightly better than a run-of-the-mill budget flick. Knowing how to shoot in the desert is going to be the biggest challenge. I’m comfortable with cameras, I’m sorta, kinda, mostly comfortable with designing the look of everything, and… Well, lighting and sound are pretty much black arts. Those that know such things are wizards, and must be given the proper respect. I’ll get hexed otherwise.

Mentioning this, some lighting technician is probably fingering their gris gris bag, staring at the screen, going “say what, motherfucker?”

My head is totes going to end up looking like Beetlejuice at the end of that film. I promise to not mock subtle and dangerous majiks.

I’ve seen another dozen or so films which were released when I was in my little funk, hiding from the world. Goddamn, cinema has gone to shit. I’ve found a total of six great films released over the last few years, where I expected to (maybe) be able to list off a few dozen. There’s an overwhelming sense of familiarity to most of the acclaimed films, with a few being so irredeemably bad that it is almost beyond belief that they managed to garner enough popularity to break even, never mind turn a profit. This makes me fearful that there isn’t room for intelligent, artful films in the current marketplace, but I’m hoping that there is still a space for things which are artfully constructed.

Are didactic speeches becoming a thing? There’s nothing wrong with films imparting lessons, but to drag everything to a halt so that someone can pontificate is ridiculous. Scriptwriting (across multiple genres) has fallen so low in my estimation that I soon expect to see Tellytubbies revived for the big screen by Guy Ritchie – I thought things couldn’t get any worse than Hobbs & Shaw, but I was overly optimistic. This is extremely depressing. You do know that there are lessons hidden in Peckinpah films, right? The narrative doesn’t come to a screeching stop so that you can be told them – you have to work a little harder for the take-away – and they serve to inform character, location, and their place in history.

The single worst atrocity against cinema has to be the opening scene to the Charlie’s Angels reboot, in which Kristen Stewart delivers a speech which goes on… and on… and on… And by the time it is over I’ve already given up the will to live. Yes, the clever little line about threat assessment is well-placed, but everything before it is so speechy that it doesn’t sound like sentences any human would say. Ever. The individual words aren’t bad, and the sentiment is great, but it sets up nothing, goes nowhere, and exists merely to exist.

Maybe there’s hope for Tommy Wiseau after all, if this is the quality of the competition…

And I’m going to have to reassess my criticism of Uwe Boll. Isn’t that a scary thought?

Onwards and… Outwards? Offwards? Something.

It has been far too long since an opportunity arose to cover my status, and while I don’t want to appear too positive at the moment – which is adequate encouragement for the universe to poke me in the ribs again – there’s enough to be getting started with…

My awareness of cultural artefacts seems to be remarkably low in relation to my liking. I’ve missed a lot. These last couple of weeks I have been catching up on as much as I can (strictly within my budget, because I have one of those now), but there are a lot of novels, television series, films, songs, and computer games to have appeared while I wasn’t looking. Some of what I’ve seen impressed me, a handful depressed me, and a couple are now on my All Time Classics list. It isn’t a great batting average, but I’m guessing that there are great works which I simply haven’t heard of, so when I get around to them the overall score for 2010s Media is likely to rise.

Where to start? Well, I’m skipping Game of Thrones. I know it had a big place in people’s lives for a while, but there’s no point in watching that until I give the last couple of books the once over. It was never a series I fell in love with – having read a few books, and seen the first two seasons before The Big Interruption – and it feels, in places, like a love letter to Gormenghast as much as a brand new work. That isn’t an insult, on any level, and I’m going to get around to it eventually.

I’ve seen Lost in Space, as it was always a franchise which held great promise, and though it has been strange to see such a new take on the set-up, I’m glad I set aside the time. While there are things I would have liked to see developed, and characters who demanded more screen time, it has been an overall successful reboot. It is also one of the few shows which made me consider how little I note really good works outside of the evergreens – it is easier to spend a few thousand words complaining about the dross which inflicts itself on my eyes, but I ought to have as much (if not more) verbiage pointing out where the cards have fallen perfectly.

Lost in Space is great. As is the few bits of Black Mirror I’ve caught up on, and so too Haunting of Hill House. These aren’t perfect, but they are very, very polished. Selected reviews will appear here at some point, but I’m not going to promise that I can keep from being annoying and pointing out the deficiencies in what has been screened in my absence.

I can’t say the same good things when it comees to film. It is tricky to arrive back online and be anywhere near analytical about the overall state of cinema, but my feeling is that something dreadful has happened in the last few years – it took my viewing of a few films (out of their release order, mind you) to catch on to something which has been at the back of my mind since seeing the trailers for Age of Ultron, and now it is impossible to shake:

Things have a certain look which I don’t really appreciate.

Did everyone get handed a set of standards that I’m not aware of? Is there now, from some strange office, a list of things which have to appear in every film? There’s a hegemony in popular entertainment – originating from I-don’t-know-where – which bothers me. Why does everything share certain stylistic tics these days? X-Men: Days of Future Past may be the most depressing, most cynical thing I’ve seen in years, and the reboot of Charlie’s Angels was a huge missed opportunity. The Fast & The Furious franchise has fallen to the level of a Cannonball Run sequel, and I’m fast losing patience with DC films. I haven’t seen Joker yet, and may not even bother.

It may merely be that I’ve picked the wrong films, in which case… My bad. But I really do get a sense of constant déjà vu when things appear again, and again, and again. Is this just me? Am I alone in thinking that we are seeing the regurgitation of a select few concepts? Is cimena eating itself?

There was a time when any genre offering was beyond tempting, but when there’s so little that these films offer it is hard to care.

Literature has served me better, with a few Stephen King books released over the last few years catching my eye immediately. I’m always going to turn to him for compelling characters, interesting plots, and great set-pieces, but King’s still serving up rather disappointing endings when he isn’t on top form. Scalzi, as always, brings a new sensibility to what he writes, and it has been interesting to see him stretch out a little and play.

Of course, things don’t stand still, and it is depressing to see the names of all who have passed while I’ve been… busy. Damn. I’ll state categorically that it is unlikely I’ll catch up on the what, where, when, why, who and how, even with the extra hours I have, so over the coming months I’m going to be rather useless. If I say something dumb (which… come on, this is me, of course that’ll happen) then it is likely because I didn’t arrive at everything in order. I’m dipping into the last few years at random and pulling what catches my eye, but there are things I’m going to overlook.

Which is partially why I gave myself three objectives:

1) Get good at Blender. It is the reason Digital Hume exists, and it isn’t an isolated thing I’m attempting. I know people are going to ponder the reasons, so I’ll be forthright about my intentions – I really want to get the Untitled Fantasy filmed, especially as it doesn’t need a lot of tricks. If I can get my shit together, good enough to create an animatronic of the entire script, then it pushes it closer to a done deal. My communications with a semi-pro director aren’t proceeding as fast as I would like, and the notion of going ahead and shooting the main desert battle with placeholder FX is at the forefront of my brain.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that sequence, and I’m pretty sure it can be done on the cheap with the right software.

There’s also a game which I ruined. My fault completely. It deserved better, and it really is an interesting side-step from what everyone else has done. There are a few properties – in other media, thankfully – which came close, but nothing has stayed in the headspace in which that game exists for long. It is something that nobody else will take on (for obvious reasons, when you finally hear more about it), so I have a duty of care to get it out there.

2) Fix at least one book a year. It is ambitious, yes, but going back and editing millions of words down into a coherent, appropriately long, intelligent narrative is something that has been on the To Do list for far too long. I’m not sure how many words I’m going to have to redo completely (I have many, many versions of the opening to my Piper homage), but the complex stuff is at the front of the list. I may even drop some new stuff straight to free ebooks, as I have no idea where to place the more experimental work. You can blame my re-reading Tristram Shandy compulsively for those.

Although the priority is on things that I feel are Important (capitalized for importance), I’m not overlooking the fun little things. At some point I’m going to have to ask for help in getting the little comic strips completed, but I can’t see that being something which demands immediate attention. They don’t really built to anything grander, so they aren’t part of my plans in the short term.

3) Get the Database back up and running. This is, in all likelihood, the most complex of the things on my To Do list. See, the version I’m currently working with is a copy of the backup, missing key elements, and with horrendously broken code – the Javascript is hacked to bits, and there are missing tags all over the place. I really screwed up big time, but I didn’t think I would actually need the backups. I should know better by now, but optimism beats practical consideration all too often. I mentioned some of the problems in the previous post, but that isn’t stopping me from proceeding, albeit slowly.

But the issue with the Database is that it has always eaten money like there was no tomorrow. I’ve been adamant that it wouldn’t carry advertising, but that’s something which I’ll address at a later point. It has also grown rather larger than it should, taking in television, film, music, literature, radio, computer games, and other media, outgrowing its original intention. I can’t do simple things, as has been proven time and time again, as there is always more information out there which adds to understanding. I want to be as complete as I can, but that always seems to lead to the same problem – too many words.

One of these days I’ll learn to sit back from the keyboard and say “done” without feeling a lingering need to add one more thing. Then another. Then…

So that’s the short term and interim goals. I also have a couple of things I’m dragging out from the folders to see if I can make them sing, but I would rather focus on a few things that are clear and have defined conclusions than start on what could end up spiralling into massive ventures.

There’s something I’ve only touched on here briefly, and that’s going to be a long-term goal – making things self-financing.

Whatever the (justifiable) arguments about monetization are, it pains me to talk about the Database as anything other than a source of information. I don’t want to start getting it grubbied up, and it feels wrong to stick a bunch of pleading notices on it. I want it kept clean and pure. Yes, that is horribly, unrealistically hopeful, especially as the thing hemorrages money, but it was set out in the original statement, and I don’t like changing these things so long after the fact.

The game should make its money back, and the books… Well, they’re questionable. There’s a lot of stuff which I know I’ve included which I know puts people off works, but those are essential for the stories to unfold properly. Call that idealism. Whatever. I’m not going to make things ultra-commercial merely to make money – yeah, I have integrity, don’t act all surprised and shit.

I’ll figure out the proper course of action eventually, even if I end up zigging when I should zag.

Status Update: The British Comic-Book Database

There’s no easy way to say this, but I think I rooted the Database. Everything was fine when I confined myself to comics, but that wasn’t nearly clear nor informative enough – there were massive gaps in what was presented and the information didn’t entirely make sense without context. This isn’t a problem confined to my efforts, as every comic database online suffers from the same problem. In an attempt to plug this data gap, albeit an unadvised one, I began adding in information required internally (rather than, as Wikipedia and others do, by providing reference links), which meant the size began increasing dramatically.

To look at where things stand right now you need to understand the way it was put together – firstly, everything was hand-coded. This wasn’t, in retrospect, the brightest idea, but it afforded me complete control of what appeared on each page. Where something needed clarification it was possible to add that material to the page. Mostly my interjections were of a linking nature, passing people forward to more comprehensive pages, but sometimes there were factual points which needed to be made.

Anyone who knows anything about British comics will understand the intrinsic ties to popular culture and sporting achievements, though those who are only familiar with US titles might be a tad bewildered at the complexity of something like this.

Take sports comics, for instance – there were interviews with sportspeople (each of whom needed a page to list their appearances in comics), there were league table “ladders” (which required that year’s positions to be noted, along with pages for each team), and a multitude of pin-ups, posters, and other miscellaneous items which had to be appropriately linked and indexed. By the time I hit the original Eagle, and had to do lists of the cutaways – with pages for each machine – and the reprints (ye gods, the reprint index…) the number of pages had become astronomical.

At last count the Database was circling the 45 million page count, and so tightly interconnected that MAMP crashes while navigating more than three or four pages deep. This isn’t (I think) a problem with MAMP as much as it has to do with the unecessary complexity of the Database itself. Everything has a .php extension, therefore I can’t read the contents without either using MAMP or opening them in a text editor, so progress is painfully slow in every way possible. I hate myself a little right now.

What is really needed is something to hold it all together on the back end, while preserving the ability to include additional information where needed.

Even a moderately useful iteration is going to require thousands of hours of tweaking to ensure stability and comprehensiveness, which I would rather not take on right now. See, the Database hemorrhages money. It sucks up finances like there is no tomorrow, and investing time and money is something like that is, at present, on the list of Very Bad Things to do. I can’t justify the headache and financial committment without at least a modicum of income from it, and keeping it free of advertising has always been a priority.

I did tell everyone to download it when they had the opportunity, so you can’t blame me for not having a copy to hand.

Now, as to its return…

There’s a plan in place to restore all that information, but with a far wider scope than anything you could possibly imagine. That’s why the page count has bloated, and why it has been so long offline. It won’t be specifically about comics, though everything that was originally present will be included (and more), although I’m going to be requiring some more people to take care of the other factors – simply adding in all the films which were covered in Look-In and Eagle were enough to give me a headache, so being comprehensive – and including things which are, at present, almost entirely absent from the historical record – is a concern.

I’m not anticipating the restoration to be in any way easy – which would, lets face it, be really boring – and there are things which I’m not entirely certain can be done at present without uncovering a trove of information that has been elusive to date. The missing information is really rather specialized, and is likely going to take some time to gather the people who have this to hand, but on the off-chance that anyone has documentation which can corroborate the information that is – at present – indexed with lots of question marks peppering the text:

• The first casualty of motorsport. The German count (or duke, or something), on whom I have absolutely nothing to go on, as whatever information is to be had seems to be offline. Idealy there would be a death certificate, though in lieu of that any documentation about the race – flyers, posters, a programme, anything – would be appreciated. Information on pre-F1 races in general would be wonderful to have, as almost every site I’ve looked at has a miserable time trying to deal with these. There are a couple of indexes which would be especially improved with this.
• The MPAA certification list. There’s some headway on this, though only the first three thousand or so films have proper referencing. Unfortunately I still don’t have anywhere near a complete run of either Radio Fun nor Film Fun, so the question remains as to which films were adapted, mentioned, advertised, or spoofed. There isn’t, as far as I can tell, any kind of list anywhere which has an index of every film to appear in comics, so I want to plug that gap.
• Likewise, a list of theatrical productions 1860-c.1920, and which were given space in proto-comics and magazines with comic strips. You can only imagine how difficult this one is…
• Music lists. Everything mentioned post-c.1961 isn’t too difficult to deal with, but there are some comics which have what I initially thought to simply be jokey refrains, which then turned out to be lines from music of the period. Ugh. I sorta regret that that I don’t have any shellac, but… then I would need something to play them on. And then I would want something to play cylinders on. And it would escalate. You can see how this is another aspect of the Very Bad Thing I mentioned, right? Well, old music is something of a nightmare to get right, especially as I have no idea where to begin with some of it. Sheet music, in particular, is a complete monstrosity to deal with. I’m pretty certain that I would get a lot more understanding of the text pieces in Ally Sloper if the theatrical and sheet music lists were done.
• Any television lists which have more information than is presently online. Specifically the earliest shows, broadcast live, which are so under-represented that it is difficult to see what is being talked about – were the condensed Shakespeare adaptations in the early years taken from specially-modified scripts, or were they the edited Victorian texts before the material was put back together again? And which plays – tantalizingly incomplete in most records, including IMDB – comprised series blocks?
• Military figures. This is a whole section that is pretty much empty. For people who are wondering… Back in the day there used to be Real Life Stories which ran in a number of publications, adapting the lives of notable individuals in strip format – the lists of these people were easy(ish) to put together, as the comics had just enough information to start with, but getting more details on their lives… Not so much. The big names – Churchill, Rommell, and the like – were a piece of cake, but some kid mentioned in dispatches from the Boer War? No birth or death certificate, no contemporary account of their life, no photographs… For a while I was under the impression that at least a handful of these were heavily fictionalized, but I’ve tracked down most of the mentions in the Times to corroborate at least some of the information.
• Sports in general. Cricket is a beautiful game to watch, but the rules seem to be written in Klingon. Or Kzinti, actually, as there are Klingon dictionaries which can make sense of the more obtuse terms. And football… I have no idea what is happening half the time, and amuse myself by imagining the ball to be one of those giant bombs in 1940s serials painted to look like a ball. So getting the facts on early football history is something of an impossibility when I’m not sure what is important and what isn’t. The indexes for Tiger and Roy of the Rovers is incomplete without an understanding of where the sport was at the time those strips were written, and it would make a lot of the text pices less difficult to follow.
• The list of books featured in various and sundry recommended reading pieces (notably from Eagle, Look-In, and early 2000 A.D.) weren’t bad, but some of the books – especially the cash-in stuff which had a worrying tendency to appear and disappear overnight in the eighties – are giving me trouble. I’ve never seen some of the books online (eBay, whilst great for some things, is a pain when searching for a specific edition), and there are at least a few dozen titles the descriptions of which I have left as a couple of lines of question marks in exasperation. Any of the _____ Joke Book releases (it seems to be a line, but don’t quote me on that) are still proving elusive, and even a handful of relatively high profile books – at the time – are impossible to sort through properly.
• Newspapers. Just… newspapers in general. Anyone? I thought that it would be a good idea (well, it seemed like it at the time) to sort through the paperback collections of strips and link them back to their initial appearances, but man, is that ever a pain in the ass. Adding to the problems, The Daily Sketch has strips which don’t appear to have been collected in any way, nor are some of the artists credited. When they are credited, they are usually given some acronym, alias, or merely their initials. Oh what fun and joy. A handful have been (tentatively) identified by style, mentions in biographies, or guesswork, but anything pre-1910 (or thereabouts) are beyond my reach. Anyone who appeared in Punch, Judy, or other publications, seem to be better represented in the historical record, but the others are a mystery.

There’s more, but of an increasingly niche nature.

Would you believe that this was meant to be an easy project?

I’m looking at this as a long-term prospect, rather than something which needs to be ready ASAP. Having a plan in place to get x amount done in a specific timeframe is difficult without knowing what information is lacking, and… Well, the dominos will fall where they fall.

As an addendum, because it has been mentioned in passing, there are two add-ons to the site which I started without much thought as to their complexity – a dangerous thing, indeed. I kicked off a list of novels based on comics and comic strips here on WordPress (with more than a little gnashing of teeth), but soon discovered a trove of international efforts which had gone unrecognized.

But that wasn’t enough. One must also consider the records, computer games, radio shows, television series, films…

An area which, in the past decade or so, has exploded. I’m getting through that list slowly, but there are things in those categories which a) have never been translated into English, b) have never officially been released outside their country of origin, c) are hellishly expensive to acquire, and d) are not guaranteed to work on the equipment I have to hand. Which is all, frankly, par for the course. I don’t expect things to be too simple, but damn, the universe loves kicking me in the balls and laughing.

The other, slightly related, project, is perhaps more commercially-minded and would likely be the starting point for a relaunch of the Database as a whole: a comprehensive index of British magazines.

Now, hold on a moment there – isn’t that more difficult than the list of comics? Well… Maybe. I’m not sure where I’m going with it, but it is easier to pick up bound collections of magazines by year (the 70s version of the Movie partwork, computer game magazines, even the likes of Photoplay) than it is comics. Not sure what to do with this, in all honesty, but it is on the list of current projects. And there are enough connections with comics, especially regards creators and characters, that it won’t be too difficult to marry the projects in future.

I’ve already made some headway finding actual release dates for a number of magazines (rather than what is written on their covers), and I anticipate this being a relatively straightfoward piece to put together compared with other subjects – the credits are already in place, for the most part, and the high print runs for most titles are going to make tracking down missing issues less troublesome.

However… There had to be a glitch it there somewhere, didn’t there? It is getting to be annoying looking for generic titles when there are other magazines (largely irrelevant to this task) which share the same name. Doubly so when the title shares its name with things that are way, way out of the scope of any of my lists, or are plain impossible to find. Now!, the replacement for Look-In, is one such title that is beginning to make me annoyed. It should be a title that is available in sufficient quantities, but there’s little to zilch about it online. And no, the music compilation albums aren’t connected in any way as far as I know.

I’m ignoring zines for the moment as there seems to be renewed interest in them, though it would be nice to see soemthing better sourced and referenced available.

Same As Before, Only Slightly Different

Everyone seems to be upgrading things around the net, and I got hit with a dozen software updates as well – designed to coincide (I’m sure) to deliberately make my laptop have a seizure. Most of what is being changed seems to be working for the better, though I can’t help thinking that Firefox’s tinkering with the address bar is merely cosmetic rather than an essential and needful expenditure of time.

I’m missing a few options as well, so hopefully the changes will be looked at for ways to incorporate the new video-friendly software with the easy navigation of earlier builds. It doesn’t appear to be amazingly faster than it was, though I haven’t tested it out yet…

Absolute Write had a Nip/Tuck at the weekend, and some new bits and pieces have been added to the boards – such as tags. My initial response was to ignore them, just as I have done on every other forum I have been on, but I can see the usefulness for folks who don’t have a compulsion to explore the threads in depth.

Aviva AntiVir Personal seems to be forever updating, so I wasn’t surprised when the notification appeared on screen, and all this tinkering is slowing down things considerably.

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Maybe the internet is in need of a massive shift once again, on to a new and exciting multiple-platform existence. I remember when the possibility was raised that fridges could order food that was running low, and when people discussed technological advances they seemed to be genuinely excited at the places we would go. Tomorrow’s World is no longer airing, and The Gadget Show – for all it covers – doesn’t exactly fill the gap. Even New Scientist seems less futuristic than it used to.

Maybe the world has moved on to a point where mobile ‘phone apps and rinky-dink software solutions have replaced Big Ideas, and any true step forward will have to be made by renegade bedroom coders. Hardware takes small steps for the most part, but I expected the software concepts to move on a bit more than they have. We are at a point where we can pretty much join up everything electrical in the home, so why do artificial barriers exist between my appliances even now?

When I want a cup of coffee, I should be able to switch the kettle on from my laptop. My mobile ‘phone should be able to unlock the front door. We should, in short, be living the way we were promised twenty years ago. The wilder claims, such as working and living on the moon, were easy to ignore, but the promise of terrestrial technology being so much better wasn’t just wishful thinking – there was merit in some of the suggestions. I want to be living that future, and I want to be living it now.

All the updates and changes that are going on at the moment shouldn’t just be about making things prettier, or adding in small changes to the operation of software. We should be looking at ways in which we can make our objects connect to each other to make life easier. To extend our digital domain across new frontiers, claim the future we were sold by magazines and television shows. We should be excited at the possibilities, and thrilled at the unexpected connections which will come.

If updates are spread across multiple hard drives, then the fridge, or the kettle, radio, television, or even the god-damned house itself, should take some of the burden off my poor laptop. Things will work faster, everything will be interlinked, and maybe we’ll produce technologies which will one day prepare us for bigger challenges. Space travel needs a lot of new toys, especially if we ever hope to colonize the moon, so by starting to think BIG down here on Earth we will be accustomed to looking at more complex situations we will undoubtedly face up there.

BitTorrent may, if politicians can quit bitching and whining about the technology, prove to be the most important step in the move to a hyper-digital existence, where everything is connected. Because it downloads in the background, we don’t notice it. This will be handy when everything suddenly needs updating, rather than putting over a lot of resources to download big upgrades in one giant chunk of data. I’m surprised that it hasn’t been put to this use yet…

The sharing of upgrades would also alleviate stress on the servers which some programs are dependent on for their continued usefulness, such as anti-virus databases.

I may have an overly-optimistic view of what we can achieve, but the tech is there. It exists. All we need do, is discover new ways in which to put it to use.