Hooked on a Feeling

Conditions: Lightening.

The Internet Is Not Your Home

Okay, there’s been a lot of discussion and argument over the whole nude celebrity internet scandal thing, but some people have made points I see as fundamentally flawed. Yes, people’s privacy have been violated, and data has been stolen, but there’s a shocking amount of naivety going on about how the internet works. I’m not talking about transport protocols, I’m talking about humans.

The Internet is where we keep our stuff. Good, bad and neutral - it's all there, either shared with friends or kept between ourselves and our dearest Facebook advertisers and data harvesters. It's where we keep our lists of ideas, our pictures, our music libraries. It's a living room, a library and a rogues' gallery of everyone we've ever met that we can access from our pants pockets, sometimes by mistake.

For as long as we've had Facebook, folks of Gervais' vintage have been reminding us, with all the smugness of people whose misspent youths could be documented by nothing more quick, portable and permanent than a Polaroid camera, that the Internet was like drinking with an elephant: It would remember everything.

"Don't put anything online you don't want potential employers to see," they kept saying, as though the Internet were not the only place we might feasibly put anything.

This is a terrible standard. We millennials have ignored it, reasoning that there is enough online from each of us that destruction is mutually assured. Between old pages from MySpace and LiveJournal and bad untagged pictures, there is no one whose Web history, if broadcast, would not mortify the world. We all know this, and so we decide not to make this our standard. The alternative is stultifying. But this does not stop the wagging fingers.

- washingtonpost.com/

Are you kidding me? Do you really think that the people who act as if the internet is their personal farm, in which they can act however they want and take whatever they want, would not have protected themselves from the outset from any comeuppance? Do these people not understand how trolls work? This kind of blind idiocy is why these scandals keep happening. The internet is where we keep all our stuff? No it bloody isn’t. I don’t keep my stuff on the internet, because I’ve always known how unsecured the internet actually is. And the stuff I do put on the internet is either anonymous, something I don’t care about, or backed up.

At some point people decided that they just had to share everything about themselves on the internet.  They just couldn't hold back any longer, and it all had to go out there, and people have been sharing and replying and gushing ever since.  These people are natural performers, who want to be noticed and appreciated - all at different levels - be it for their flowers they've planted in the garden, to what they and their kids are having for lunch, to what they look like in this.  And frankly, that's fine.  Express yourself how you like.  What's annoying is that these people have become the majority - the vocal majority at least - and they think they should be able to control what is effectively uncontrollable.  The genie won't go back in the box, and these guys somehow believe that it will, and act all outraged when they realise just how exposed they have made themselves.



Film Review: Hercules

Traditionally Hercules is presented as some kind of half-divine troubleshooting do-gooder, who bumbles his way from one village to another, righting wrongs and punching things. This latest film however delivers a different take on the character. This time Herc is basically a mercenary who protects villages for a price, so that one day he can retire and build a nice house. He encourages the embellished stories about him in order to help frighten his potential enemies, and he has a team! Yes, a bunch of disparate tough guys (and gal) travel with him, helping out for a part of the profit.

This story is about a King whose lands are under threat from some new great force. Hercules and his team have to quickly train the villagers to fight as an army. But crucially, all is not as it seems. Hercules will be betrayed, and will have to make a choice.

I actually enjoyed this, for what it was. It's got plenty of cheesy moments where a better director would have smoothed things over, but I liked the approach they had of presenting Herc as a mercenary who encourages the stories about him, and relies heavily on his team to get things done. The other actors actually had definable characters and arcs to go through, and it was satisfyingly violent. The Rock always comes across as very genuine in any film he is in, and again here he convinces as the troubled legendary hero. In a world of three hour action bores, this wasn't a slog to sit through either, which counts for something. Three punched horses out of five.



Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy

As the film starts I wasn’t really sure what to expect. A sad hospital prologue scene then transitions to a dark abandoned planet where our hero arrives to loot some precious treasure. He takes off his helmet, puts on a walkman and then starts dancing his way through the landscape, booting alien lizards out of the way while singing along to the tune. At that point the audience relaxes into their seats. Everything’s Ok, this is actually a fun and creative space opera, the latest film in the Marvel Universe.

Our hero’s name is Peter Quill, and through him we are rushed through a universe of diverse characters, planets and threats. Peter will be hunted by an assassin and two bounty hunters, they all end up in space jail, which leads to them all teaming up and escaping. They are trying to find, and then dispose of, a powerful and valuable gem, and then deal with the bad guy who wants to use it to blow up a planet.

But the plot isn’t really the point of this film, the point really seems to just have fun and go along on this crazy ride. We’ll laugh, we’ll be surprised, we’ll laugh some more. Marvel’s approach to its cinematic universe has been to find and hold the correct tone for each property, and again they’ve proven themselves geniuses at delivering a tricky concept to the general audiences in an engaging and enjoyable way. I won’t say that the film is brilliant. I don’t really get the characters – perhaps because there’s too many of them and not enough time for each, and the bad guy is a blank wall, and the worlds it’s set in are baffling. But it’s fun, and in the end I get why the team actually becomes a team. And, and this is the crucial bit, I’d actually like to see what happens next with these guys. It’ll probably be a gas. Four and a half Groots out of Five.



- Peace out