As always tonight I watched Doctor Who and as always it was a cracking episode. Also as always I went to read the comments on the internet and not as always I found myself incensed by what I read. Not because I disagreed with what people thought of the episode or whether it was good or bad. No I was disgusted by people who complained because the BBC aired one of those “If you have been affected by the events of this show” pieces at the end. People are actually complaining that the BBC took the opportunity to reach out to people who might be suffering with depression.

It is not something I generally broadcast but in my 20s I was diagnosed with depression and had chats with head doctors and a period of time on anti-depressants. It wasn’t the best time of my life but I got better. I’ve been a might too cheerful for my own good for a while now. Having suffered like Van Gogh (though certainly not to the same extent) I can say what the BBC did was actually very important and incredibly sensitive. Anyone who has been or is depressed (diagnosed or otherwise) will have seen bits of themselves in that portrayal of Van Gogh. People with depression often don’t realise they need help or those that do often don’t believe they deserve it. Depression is an illness that sabotages a person ability to get help. Indeed had my mother had not told me I need to go see a doctor I wouldn’t have sort out treatment. Those not being treated might be prompted by that message to see a doctor.

Those who have been depressed will have found that ending will have affected them a great deal. Fuck, it made me cry. Unless you have been there and felt so utterly worthless and have been unable to see any future that is not pure misery you cannot begin to understand being shown you are not in such a definitive way would mean. Unless suicide has felt like an (or even the only) option you won’t understand. Airing that message might help those who have been depressed deal with their emotions. Indeed it might also have prevented some from having a relapse.

However not every one is Van Gogh. Not everyone gets to be great some of us are just normal. So while this episode would have resonated in a good way to people who have recovered from depression it would have an entirely the opposite effect on people who are depressed. Especially if they are undiagnosed or untreated. The message someone who is depressed could take from watching that episode is “You are actually worthless because you are not awesome like Van Gogh. There is no hope for you”. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to understand that kind of thinking isn’t a good thing to reinforce in the minds of people who are depressed. Indeed for someone who is already far gone that could be the straw that break the camels back. That message by the BBC at the end could have saved lives.

So that simple little message that didn’t affect your lives at all, took you 10 seconds to hear and that you are now bitching about on the internet could have changed or saved someone’s life. Think about that. It seems to be the general public’s attitude to mental illness hasn’t moved on a great deal since Van Gogh’s time. Why not think for a moment instead of being so petulant and selfish.

Last night had the pilot of BBC3′s new show Pulse. Sci-fi geek websites and TV critics led me to believe Pulse would be awesome. It was to be an intelligent, shocking and gory science fiction horror tour de force. It fucking wasn’t. Either someone paid them to promote this trash or certain critics shouldn’t be allowed to watch TV ever again, ever.

Pulse was boring and tediously predictable. Slow, plodding and unimpressive. An episode of Causality is more riveting. I actually took to reading Fark.com half way through it was that dull. Thankfully I had my iPad to hand. There is nothing remotely surprising let alone shocking in Pulse at all. Nothing. Even the final reveal was telegraphed to high heaven. I’ve seen gorier cartoons too. Call me cynical but I don’t consider people being squirted with a turkey-baster full of fake blood to be that gory. Supposedly this was a tense and dark show. It was certainly dark (the lights kept going out) but it was about as tense as my pectoral muscles.

And the characters? I wanted to reach into the screen and slap the characters senseless. Now I like a cast of unlike-able characters that do dumb stuff, I watch ‘Stargate: Universe’ after all but this was beyond the pail. For Doctors they all seemed to behave like the idiotic teens you see in 80s slasher flicks. Naturally everyone is gorgeous and is sleeping with everyone else. Is my annoyance of this a sign I am getting old or something? If you spot inconsistency in a patients chart and witness unrecorded treatments do you give the culprit time to fake the paperwork and corresponding computer data before you try to do anything? Really? Can junior doctors not use photocopiers? Naturally the somewhat petite female lead decides to investigate the goings on all by herself. And, oh my god, how funny is a trainee doctor with a blood phobia? Hilarious! Oh, how I laughed. Believable characters my sweaty arse.

It completely lacked any subtly at all. A section from my thought processes last night: Into the morgue we go. That medical circular saw seems conveniently placed on that table, doesn’t it? Oh no! A zombie! And he is attacking handsome-male-doctor-number-1. Oh no! Look an extreme close up of that medical saw and a mallet to the back of my head in case I missed it. Gee I wonder what it is going to happen when the whiny was-much-better-in-going-postal-on-sky doctor stops screaming…

This whole episode would have been the bit before the opening titles of a Fringe episode. But of then it would have had better acting, a more eventful plot, tension and some nice intro credits after it. Fringe would probably also have special effects that went beyond splashing red paint around, someone poking the underside of some stretched skin coloured latex and the occasional use of a butchers leftovers.

The cast is an inexplicably pretty bunch, as if this was some kind of US TV show. Why the pointless female nudity? Now I’m not usually one to complain about pointless female nudity and the actress involved was worth seeing in the buff but come on! Why the sex scene at all? Because it is BBC3 and we have to be edgy? Christ I hate it when people force me to take the same side as feminists and the Daily Mail. Not only that I would rather have seen Claire Foy in the nude (or that black dress from Going Postal mmmmm)  anyway. I guess she is a proper actress and above flashing her norks for my amusement. A flaw I find prevalent in so many women. Well I guess that takes care of any accusations that I’m not a chauvinist.

This is one of those TV shows that has been deemed good before anyone has seen it and this promptly exclaimed to be so once the critics got hold of it. It ain’t. Not unlike everyone decided Avatar was awesome before they even saw it. They should have spent the money on more ‘Being Human’ instead.

Twas utter crap. You will notice I didn’t cover the plot much. Well it is basically somebody is using a hospital to do unapproved medical testing. That about sums it up. I refuse to even give it the customary out of 5 rating. This is the last time I watch anything based on the opinions of TV critics and the last episode of Pulse I will watch. The fuckers made me waste time I could have used playing Red Dead Redemption.

That short answer is because people are a bunch of selfish jerks but I fancy a rant so I am going to expand on this. Aren’t you lucky? The BBC is in the unenviable position of needing to please all of the people all of the time. Which is we all know is simply not possible. They can’t win. No matter what they do a bunch of loud licence fee payers with too much time on their hands will be at their throats demanding their heads. Forgive my mixed metaphors but I like them. Naturally these loud mouth cretins who frankly should have jobs to do or a blog to write will be egged on by commercial media.

You see if the BBC do popularist programming like shitty reality TV then they get accused of dumbing down by Guardian reading wombats. However, if they do intelligent programmes then the unwashed masses don’t watch them and they BBC get accused of being elitist by Chimps carrying copies of The Sun. It’s not like the can balance the books either because if they do then both groups complain their needs are not being fully met. This applies to politics too. Do a piece critical of the BNP they are out of touch left-wing academics but if they put the BNP on TV they are evil fascists. Anything they do gets them accused of bias by ‘the other side’. I’m also kind of fed up hearing God-botherers, like that twat Simon Mayo, whining about the declining level of Christian focused content on the BBC despite it still being vastly more than any other religious group let alone for atheists or agnostics. But see them flip out if the BBC dares show a 6 part series totalling just a handful of hours starring Richard Dawkins and his philosophy. Read the rest of this entry »

The who Avatar hype machine is beyond insane. When it was people claiming how awesome it would be because James Cameron was Directing it was silly. When critics and other in the industry started buying into the hype it was surprising. When reviews started saying how awesome it was despite critics usually flaying alive any film with such a heavy focus on special effects over plot it was stupid. When people got abused by Avatards on internet forums for saying they enjoyed it but it wasn’t ‘all that’ it was pathetic fanboyism. When Avatar’s initially didn’t blow the box office away and we got headlines like “Avatar almost breaks records” it was ridiculous. And when people started naming their kids Pandora (presumably they will have a stalker named Adrian when they get older) and getting depressed because they couldn’t live in the CGI world Avatar had created it was simply sad. Now I am beginning to think money is involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Opera users (All 6 of them) are more fanatical and delusional than Apple Zealots (with frankly less justification) and they annoy the crap out of me with the way they hijack every browser discussion on the internet. Try to discuss the various merits of TraceMonkey and V8 (they’re fast right?) and some muppet will throw in some totally irrelevant observation about Opera. Try and compare and contrast IE7′s and IE8′s rendering engines and some Opera user will appear to talk about how standard compliant Opera is. New version of a Browser with a new feature or a new Firefox extension? Then expect to see hundreds of comments of how Opera does the same thing already. Though they will forget to mention it doesn’t do it (whatever it is) anywhere near as well.

They are a bunch of entitled whiners, the Newcastle supporters of computing. Opera deserves to win everything and have praise heaped upon it. I tried to think of some non-UK centric equivalents but I couldn’t come up with anything. My sport knowledge is somewhat limited because, you know, I’m a geek. Feel free to post international equivalents to Newcastle football supporters in the comments.

Opera users please can you answer me this damned question. If Opera is so brilliant why isn’t everyone using it? Or at least have more people using it than are using Chrome, which came out like yesterday. Let me guess an evil Firefox/Google/Microsoft conspiracy? Stupid users? Or are you going for the Opera user change their Browser identity string to get around lazy/corrupt Web Developer’s who try and block them from viewing websites? How can a browser that has been around longer than most others have such a small user base? How shit must the Opera marketing people be? The problem is that Opera scratches no particular itch. It isn’t just there, familiar and convenient like IE or Safari, it isn’t extendible to the same extent as Firefox and it isn’t as lean and as technically excellent as Chrome. Any Web Developer worth his salt will have Firefox and a host of Web Developer centric extensions installed so they can’t even count on the tech crowd any more. Though it might help if Opera spent more time working on the basic Web Browser features and stopped adding useless crap like bittorrent clients and web servers. They can’t find a niche so are desperate to create one, and failing miserably.

By the way Unite in Opera 10 is rubbish. Virtually useless (doubly so because nobody else uses it) and clumsy to use.

For the record I used to pay for Opera back in the day, you know when it was still a good browser. Before they got Fisher Price to re-design the interface (twice) and started adding every trendy gimmick they could get their hands on in a desperate attempt to make their product matter. I’ve also installed every major release version of Opera since version 3 because as a professional Web Developer I do my testing properly. I’ve not seen a single reason to use any release of Opera as my main browser since version 6.

There have recently been lots of complaints that ‘Stargate: Universe’ is sexist. Frankly I am sick of deplorable sexism in Science Fiction. It isn’t coming from the writer or producers but from the double standard wielding hypocrites in Science Fiction fandom. We had snifters of the same thing about BSG. So many people think SGU is sexist because the characters in it are reacting and behaving like real people rather than the Ancient Greece style heroes that have previously made up the characters of a Stargate show. Rather than having a decade long period of sexual tension that can only exist in fiction the SGU characters just do it and get it out of the way. Now I love Stargate’s SG1 and Atlantis but I’ve never ever expected them to be overly realistic. Sometimes the characters behaved realistically but more often than not the show was Spider-man and Deadpool in space. It was a light show with quite a high level of comedy. SGU is neither of these things.

Read the rest of this entry »