20 Jan 13
It's been a while since I had a good rant!
As a graphic designer, I certainly understand and appreciate the need for copyright. But when you instigate a copyright system that patently doesn’t work, then ensure that it’s not implemented consistently, and then impose draconian penalties that inconvenience and abuse customers who are doing the right thing, then it’s time to have a good hard look at the system.
Yep, I’m talking about movies. Who hasn’t had their blood boil at being forced to watch an semi-abusive advertisement about copyright violation on a DVD that you paid good money for? Or driven mad by code systems that don’t let you play a movie that an overseas seller happily sold you? The system is a mess, and while copyright abusers happily continue to churn out cheap knock-offs in their millions, the innocent consumer is demonized and inconvenienced.
My current DVD/Blu-ray player is, ostensibly, a universal player. That is, it will play a disc from any world region. The hilarious thing is, this functionality is made as difficult as possible for the user to access. You have to hit a button on the remote and enter a secret four digit code; then a hidden menu appears from which you can change the region code. I mean, for frak’s sake, what is this, a secret decoder ring club for teenage boys? I had to discover this hidden functionality, of course, on the internet, to which I was directed by a representative of the manufacturer on the phone; the entire process felt like a whispered drug deal in the corner of some dingy bar.
Of course, the region resets to the default all the time, so I’m continually forced to do this ridiculous dance every time I play discs I’ve legally purchased from the US or the UK or Australia or whatever. Of course, the studios are happy for you to buy the discs, they just don’t want to make it all easy for you to play them; and when you do, you’ll probably be subject to some non-skippable, high volume abuse about how pirating discs is a crime on a par with murdering old ladies.
Thankfully, things are, at the speed of your average glacier, changing. I’ve noticed a few recent discs have ads that have finally changed tack, actually thanking the viewer for doing the right thing. Well it only took them about ten years to wake up to that bit of basic psychology.
In the meantime, go to any southeast Asian country and you can pick up pirated DVDs by the bucketful. Not that I would, as the quality is almost without fail utterly crap, but the point for the studios is, stop zeroing in on the soft targets and hit the people who are actually causing the problem. Or better yet, accept the fact that copyright abuse is a fact of life, and figure it into your multi-million dollar profit margins.
What annoys me is the stupidity of the entire approach; because the bottom line is, if people can get content, and play content easily, they will happily pay for it. Make it difficult, expensive, or just plain impossible, and those convenient illegal methods start to look a hell of a lot more enticing.
Don’t even get me started on the fact that AppleTV doesn’t make TV shows available for rental or purchase in NZ because SkyTV have locked down the local distribution deals. Or that you have to re-download all your iOS apps when you move to another country. We’re all happily paying for content that isn’t actually ours, and is subject to a ridiculous multiplicity of out-of-date national copyright laws that have hardly woken up to the fact that there is an internet, let alone been flexible enough to accommodate it.
I’m sure one day society will look back on the growing pains of the international content delivery system and laugh at the poor chumps who had to put up with them. Unfortunately, I realize more and more each day that ours is the generation that must endure the early, faltering steps of the digital revolution. Probably just as I shuffle off this mortal coil it will all start working properly…
Grumpy Rants
12 Jan 13
JoJo and I hopped over Cook Strait to Wellington—an easy half hour flight—for a couple of nights to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at the best place you can see it in Australasia: The Embassy Theatre, where it had its world premiere. It’s the first time we’ve been there together, and Welly did us proud by turning on two days of absolutely atrocious wet and windy weather—but then, Wellington without wind is like Gandalf without his beard!
Now that we live ‘in the country’, it’s a strange experience going back to a busy city: fun, but something I am very, very glad to experience occasionally as a treat rather than all the time. Wellington is just big enough to be interesting, and just small enough to not be stressful and difficult, though the damn wind can start doing your head in after a while.
Apart from the film, we packed in a good dose of shopping—mostly for books—and several exhibitions: the Gamemasters videogame and Angels & Aristocrats exhibitions at the excellent Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, and the small but perfectly formed Dr. Grordborts exhibition, featuring the amazing artwork of Weta conceptual designer Greg Broadmore.
So how was The Hobbit? Well, for a start I couldn’t be more impressed with The Embassy Theatre, a gorgeous 1920s cinema with beautiful wood and marble fittings, one of the largest screens in the southern hemisphere, and the only place in Australasia fitted out with a new Dolby 360º Atmos sound system (for which The Hobbit’s sound is mixed). With premiere seats (leather seats in the centre of the theatre, name-plated with stars from The Lord of the Rings—I highly recommend G26 and G27, Hugo Weaving and Liv Tyler) and a glass of wine in hand, we were set to see the film the way Peter Jackson surely intended.
We weren’t disappointed. Of course, the high definition 48fps is somewhat jarring at first; so realistic and detailed that even the 3D image seems a bit flat and almost TV-like. But I found myself realising that my brain was just being confronted with something that it had hitherto not identified as ‘the look of film’, so had tried to shoehorn it into the definition of TV instead. Of course, it’s completely different from both, and it wasn’t long before I was so immersed in the film that I forgot the somewhat strange feel. And by the end, during one of the climactic scenes, I suddenly realised that this looked absolutely frickin’ amazing, even groundbreaking.
We’re definitely in a transition period, and I suppose it won’t be long before films of our generation look like the fuzzy images of the 70s and 80s. What amazes me is how the brain’s visual cortex adapts when confronted with things like higher frame rates and three dimensional film images. It tries first to fit it into its established frames of reference—and eventually, if you can let go a bit, it comes to terms with the fact it is being presented with something new and accepts it.
Anyway, this is how I interpreted the experience and I found it fascinating. The film itself delivered all the spectacle you no doubt expect. I think the unique atmosphere of the book is somewhat lost in all the bombastic action scenes, but this is a film, not a book, and as such is just the Peter Jackson-styled adaptation to be enjoyed on its own terms. It’s great fun. The interior of Erebor and the dragon hoard, in particular, was just how I imagined it.
My life is very different since I first saw The Lord of the Rings, and I was quite affected by scenes of the beautiful scenery of The Shire, realising that I now lived in the country where it was filmed.
A perfect evening was capped off by a couple of glasses of Pegasus Bay Bel Canto Riesling (our favourite NZ wine at the moment), calamari, olives and a cheese board at the bar downstairs: The Black Sparrow.
We plan to repeat the entire experience next year for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug!
New Zealand Dr Grordborts, The Hobbit, Wellington
08 Jan 13
Happy new year, dear Headless Hollow readers!
I start the new year with a link to a new article about me—yes, me, me, it’s all about me—it’s my blog after all, what did you expect? The folks over at the Tékumel Foundation have posted a short article asking me five questions about my involvement with Professor Barker’s wonderful creation, the world of Tékumel. Check it out!
If all this talk of something called Tékumel is a foreign language to you, then settle back and visit tekumel.com, the website I created back in 1997. If you’re a fan of world-building a la Tolkien, then you’ll find this uniquely non-Western take on imaginative fantasy to be right up your alley. And yes, he invented his own languages … Professor Barker sadly passed away last year, but his creation lives on, carefully managed by the aforementioned Foundation, and there are many plans to release old and new Tékumel material to the world. Hopefully this amazing work will begin to reach the wider audience it deserves.
Roleplaying Games interview, Tekumel
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