the brownhaze: the dsutbin of the internet

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since 18/9/2003

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares… USA

America produces some fantastic telly, typically drama or action. Heroes, Prison Break, Lost (if you can be bothered with it). While they came up with the original concept of the “reality program” the ones they produce are an almost unwatchable mess. Add this to the fact that a British format program has almost never been sucsesfully ported across to the USA successfully and you will get some idea of the problems with the US version of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares.

Before I go on, let me make a few things clear. My comments are based on the actual US broadcast of the show of FOX. I haven’t seen the UK version, and I hope that it has been de-Americanised to an extent. Also, I love Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares.

I am happy to concede that a lot of what is portrayed on the UK version is contrived, for instance the first time he walks up to a restaurant, he has obviously seen it before because his director will have been setting the shot up, but a guess a steady cam shot of Ramsey walking up to a Restaurant would not have been dramatic enough, so in the US they bring along a camera crane, so all of the external shots of the restaurant look like something off of a Hollywood movie, which only works to diminish the realism (and therefore the point) of the show.

For some reason everything that happens on the show has to be explained to the viewer like they have suffered terrible brain damage as a result of a car crash. For instance, imagine a scene where Gordon walks in to a kitchen to find it is very dirty, here is the way it would be shown in the US version:

• From the start of the show we would have seen clips Gordon’s reaction to the dirty kitchen.

• Just before he walks in “voiceover man” would have accounted “Gordon walked in to the kitchen to find it dirty”.

• Then the shot of Gordon walking in to the kitchen

• Then one of the almost constant talking head shots of one of the restaurant staff saying “when Gordon walked in to the kitchen, he saw it was dirty.

• All through this the incidental music would have been playing letting you know if this was a good\bad\tense situation.

This incidental music is literally playing all the way through the program. There is not one second that does not have music playing to let you know if you should be cheering or jeering. It gets very distracting after a while.

I know it’s very popular to say that Americans are stupid, but surely that cannot be so stupid that they need every second of the show spoon-fed to them in three different ways. It’s not as if this is a Brief History if Time or something, the concepts in the show a pretty easy to grasp.

Of course, this is all covered in the usual American schmults that I guess I can’t complain about, it’s a cultural difference. For instance, in the British version, sometimes a man may be brought to tears when he realises that he has been the problem damaging his restaurant, at this point they will normally try to get a way form the camera to get a few moments to compose them selves. On the US version most of the staff of the restraint are blubbing for half the show, it’s like some sort of badge of honour “look how sensitive I am, I cry if I over cook the cabbages”.

They have taken what was a fantastic format which is largeley due to Ramsey himself and the humanity of the situations it records, and put it through the lowest-common-denominator-created-by-committee meat grinder and come up with something that looks as if you are watching a documentary through the worst soap opera ever written.

Labels: soap box

Friday, January 25, 2008

LOLZ

Labels: funny, picture

Thursday, January 24, 2008

“Review” of the Mac Book Air

Apple have just release their “ultra portable” Mac Book Air, which is basically a very, very flat Ibook. You cannot change the battery and it only has one USB port on it, only got a 60GB disk. Like a lot of Apple stuff, it looks really nice, but has some pretty major usability issues.

This video is of its launch. Unwired, for it is they who made the video, review a bunch of things in a normally pretty even handed way. Unfortunately they decided to send a guy who owns an iPhone to this event. QED, a Mac fanboy.

The Mac fanboy is a particularly obsessive creature. If Apple released the iTurd, a white, shiny, plastic covered dog egg, the Mac fanboy would still rush out and buy it by the truckload. This kind of almost religious fandom is demonstrated when Steve Jobs (their messiah) opens an envelope (containing the as yet un revealed mac book) to which the crowed cheer and whoop… the opening of an envelope.

The unforgivable thing is the guy from unwired is pretty much knocking one out over this laptop all they way through his little demo, not exactly impartial. I love the bit where he ask how much it is, they say “£1199” (baring in mind that the EEEPC ultra portable is only £200) to which is says “wow twelve hundred quid is pretty impressive” implying that its reasonable price.

He then signs off with “I’m going to have mine on order very soon”. This makes me hate Apple in an irrational way.

Labels: apple, geek, soap box

Monday, January 14, 2008

They physics of Crysis

I have just started playing Crysis (the follow up to far cry). I am please to say that my new games rig will run it at a nice speed with high res textures and a reasonable resolution as long as I keep the fancy shadows turned off.

The process of tuning the game has been to run it with most of the bells and whistles turned down, periodically increasing some of the settings to see how the performance is affected. The most recent setting that I updated was the “physics”. In a computer game the physics refers to the realistic movement of objects within the game based on gravity, buoyancy and friction. i.e. wood floats, metal sinks. You throw a tin can and it goes a long way, you throw a light rubbish bag it doesn’t.

The physics of the game and already impressed me when at one stage I was hiding behind a palm tree to avoid the bullets of a jeep mounted machine gun when I saw trees started falling over in the direction of the jeep. I thought this must be some sort of scripted sequence until I realist the trees where being mown down by the machine gun fire. That’s when I realised how “physicsy” the game is. I obviously then stole the jeep and spent 5 minutes mowing down trees, then driving over them to make them snap. Very cool.

This was all with the physics turned down to “low”. I was intrigued to see what would happen when I turned them up to “high”. How could physics quality be improved. Well, its not, you just get loads more of it. Everything becomes moveable and destructible. Shoot your machine gun in to the branches of a tree and you are showered with leaves and branches. Run your jeep in to a shanty town style shack and the thing comes crashing down. Some of these shacks have window shutters that are helped open with wooden supports, if you want to shut the windows, knock the supports away. You can have hours of fun just making things fall over.

In the game you can fix it so you have super strength (I won’t bother explaining why, but it is very cool). Also in the game you can pick the bad guys up by the neck and throw them. What’s really fun is to throw a bad guy though a house with super strength. He dies and the place falls down, W00T.

The reason that I have written these words is because the physics is a little out of sync with reality. Things fall over far to easily. The specific example that I am thinking of is a water melon that I saw in one of these shacks. I had already sent that if I shot the melon it would split in to various juicy bits. I thought “I will throw it at the wall to see what happens”. What happened was, I knocked one of the walls out and the ceiling fell in.

I had knocked a house down with a water melon… which remained intact.

That aside. If you have computer that can handle it, and you only play one first person shooter this year. Make it Crysis, its amazing.

Labels: geek, soap box

Friday, January 11, 2008

Arguing on the Internet.

“Arguing on the internet is like running in the special Olympics. Even if you win, you are still a retard”

I know this. Yet I still do it.

It has been a new years resolution of mine to be tolerant and less of a Victor Meldrew. To this end I am going to stop writing letters in to the Reading Evening Post, I have left the American by birth Irish by blood facebook group which I was only in to tell Americans that they are not Irish. Thus far my resolution was not going too badly. Until I joined the facebook group “I bet I can find a million ppl that DON'T want smoking back in pubs”

I have been engaged in what has largely been lively and reasonably intelligent debate on the main wall of this group for a while attempting to get people to understand my points of view. The part that I am writing this post about is when a troll wandered in to the group and started calling everyone whining pussies because there are greater environmental and social problems then the one we are discussing. I will put the basic jist of our conversation below, It was interspersed with other posts, I have cut them out to keep it readable, Names have been changed to protect the innocent. :

Troll wrote
at 12:16pm yesterday
This group really is a bunch of whining and snivelling idiots.

How exactly are you accessing the internet? - becasue unless you live in a wigwam in a self-sufficent commune on a hill somewhere YOU ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR POLLUTION THAT IS DESTROYING OUR ENVIRONMENT AND KILLING OUR PLANET.

Problem is you nerds can't put it into perspective - driving round in your 4x4's, flying around the world, creating huge carbon foot-prints but oh so excited and brattish about stopping a few people having a fag. You make me sick.

YOU SAD, SAD HYPOCRITES!

Troll wrote
at 12:24pm yesterday
I think next they should ban all that ice in ice rinks - I mean, it's got to be a health hazard all that frozen water - and us non-skaters don't want to be hurt do we. Health and Safety, folks!!!

Me wrote
at 12:29pm yesterday
@Paul

what baring has global pollution got on this issue? Have you also joined the group about chavs that play music on their phones and tried to guilt trip their members too?

Troll wrote
at 1:37pm yesterday

Oh I get it - you don't like a bit of smoke in a pub because it "pollutes" the pub - but at the same time YOU are quite HAPPY to pollute EVERYONE'S environment.

You see, you don't get it [3rd party].

And considering Alcohol is the most dangerous drug on the planet why hasn't that been banned? Kids who get run over by drink drivers and students who get beaten up in the street by drunks haven't got any choice on their health being affected have they?

Don't worry it will come, because you are all too STUPID and BLIND to see you civil and human rights sailing down the swanny whilst you whinny and wine like a bunch of spoilt 5-year-olds.

Me wrote
at 1:51pm yesterday
@Troll

Where as you are en enlightened and worldly wise man who is taking on the human rights and world environmental issues by whining on at people, off topic, in a forum set up to discuss a specific issue.

Perhaps we do have wind turbines in our back gardens powering our computers. Perhaps we are active in Greenpeace. Perhaps we are lawyers who work for free on the behalf of amnesty international. You don’t know.

While I am very much against feeding trolls like you with responses, I will say this. I am pretty sure that no one in this group gives a rat’s fart about anything you have to say. Not because the points you raise are unimportant, but because you raise them like a petulant twat who is only out to start arguments because he has already had 6 wanks today and is looking for something else to do.

I am sure there are some posts with incorrectly used apostrophes somewhere you could keep yourself busy with.

Troll wrote
at 3:20pm yesterday

I'm guessing that, as you are spending all day on here defending your childish and selfish opinions on this silly little group you are NOT a human rights lawyer or environmental activist. I do love the way when a valid counter-argument is presented you go - "oh that's not the issue we are talking about"...err, try googling dialectics and comprehend things are interconnected in a holistic way.

YOU lot are complainging about air pollution - but not only do you particpate in a far greater cause of air pollution (and if you seriously expect me to believe you're existence on this planet in no way involves petrol or diesel powered combustion engines you are even more stupid that I already expected) but you also pollute the air with your MOANING and your WHINGING and your WHINING.

Hell, you've got your ban - and still you are snivelling, you pathetic wretches.

Me wrote
at 3:26pm yesterday
“Blah blah, look at me, I’m Paul Nelson. I go on and on about stuff that people could possibly be interested in if it weren’t for the fact that I put them off the subject with my insults and annoying persistence blah blah blah.”

Face it Paul. You don’t give a toss about these issues either, you are just attempting to get a rise out of some poor facebook sap for your own amusement, which, at the moment, I am providing you with.

How many other groups are you doing this in at the moment 5, 10, 15? Its really very sad.

Well, unfortunately I don’t have an ignore button I can press to stop your pointless messages popping up on my screen, so I guess I will just have to do it in my head.

Welcome to my ignore list, population – you.