Kubrick Mind Screw

He loves to move the dead and other typically inanimate objects around between shots.

 

Downloading "illegal" content in Japan

As you may have heard, from October 1st this year, the intentional downloading of "illegally" uploaded content will be punishable by jail time. Some internet commentators have gone full-on panic mode suggesting that the police will be battering down your door and sticking you in prison for 2 years for watching something on YouTube. Japan never struck me as a country likely to make wide-sweeping reforms for better or for worse, so I decided to do a little bit of research into this.

At first, there was very little information available. The very idea of "illegal" uploads itself I felt was somewhat spurious, as copyright infringement is primarily a civil offense. A bit more information has since become available which has clarified things a little, and from what I can garner, what's going to change come October 1st is approximately zilch. It seems the whole part about punishing "illegal" downloads was added to an otherwise sensible bill at the last minute by the film, music and talent agency cartels for their own benefit and without much thought for the consequences. The following points jump out at me:

• The new law only applies to film and music.
• TV programmes aren't covered as they're broadcast for free anyway. The only exception is if DVDs are on sale. Uploading is probably a different matter mind.
• YouTube and other "streaming" services aren't covered, and for those hosted in the US the DMCA takedown policy takes precedent.
• Copyright infringement remains a civil offense, so the rights holder would have to actually take you to court in Japan to get any kind of fine or sentence. There, they would have to demonstrate that your "illegal" download harmed their business, which any vaguely competent defense could argue down to a slap on the wrist at worst—keep in mind that "illegal" uploads often get to thousands if not millions of people which gives them a case for statutory damages, whereas a single "illegal" download is a single copy which is practically worthless. Likewise, overseas media would have to sue in Japan, which seems an awful lot of trouble for HBO to go to over somebody downloading a single episode of Game of Thrones.
• The most common form of "illegal" downloading is BitTorrent, which uploads what you download as you download it, so anybody using BitTorrent to download "illegal" content can already be pursued for damages anyway.

So what it seems to boil down to is the enabling of an extra line of legal threat aimed at people who're thinking about grabbing the latest SMAP album off Winny, or the latest movie staring somebody from SMAP. It would have to take an extra special set of circumstances to make any difference at all to the real world.

EUROBiZ Magazine: May 2012

Open publication - Free publishing - More eurobiz japan

EUROBiZ

Awake Season Finale Spoilers

Yesterday I watched the final episode of Awake, the NBC drama about a police detective who loses either his wife or his son in a road accident, depending on which version of reality he happens to be occupying that day. Although Doctor Lee describes the reality he isn't present in as an "alternate reality" (with the stress on the first syllable), such a thing isn't impossible from a grammatical standpoint as has previously been pointed out, and people really need to stop saying that. "Alternate" is primarily a verb, and can only be used as an adjective with a plural form of a noun (e.g. "alternate layers"). I suspect he meant to describe it as a "parallel universe" or possibly an "alternative reality", but given his specialist field appeared to be confrontation therapy—dealing with emotional issues by preaching logical analysis at the choir—and not Basic English Grammar, then I will have to excuse this behaviour, even if I can't forgive it. Ever.

So on with the analysis. A couple of episodes in, I began to think about how from a storytelling standpoint the story could possibly be resolved satisfactorily. If it turned out that one reality was real and one was a delusion, then that would mean that half of the show never happened and was thus inconsequential. Thanks for wasting our time! Likewise, it would be more than just a little unfair on whichever character happened to have been dead the whole time to the unfair advantage of the other, as both were equally important to the lead. The only way it could reasonably go is to have both his wife AND son killed in the accident, and have a fractured psyche deal with the loss by only allowing one to be dead at any given moment. So that way, both realities are real but are interpreted by his two divergent psychoses—everything that happened really happened, in a manner of speaking, with a few details (such as his wife and son being around) fudged here and there to accommodate the increasingly large blind spots he was necessarily having to develop.

So I was very pleased at the end of the final episode to discover that this was indeed what had happened. Or at the very least, there was no indication that this isn't what happened. And that's the problem really—it was left ambiguous to the point that suggesting every single moment of every single episode never happened at all was actually a valid interpretation. Here on the other hand is my interpretation.

The final scene where he's reunited with his wife and son under the same roof IS all in his head—he's finally gone off the deep end. This can only work if he has nothing to connect him to the real world, so logically both of them must be dead. Now if we think back to the first episode, he stated quite clearly that he had no problem at all living with a psychosis if it meant he got to keep his family, and he had no intention of ever making "progress". So in that sense, that the delusions converged into a single—even more (as in, completely) removed from reality—delusion with both his wife and his son alive, is a happy ending from his perspective. He probably knows it's not real, and is happy with that too. In fact, let's take that further—it's just after the therapist tells him it's turtles all the way down that it freeze frames and the door opens. It's almost as if she'd unwittingly told him what he needed to hear to make it all better, and he wittingly created the new reality for himself in response to that.

Some other theories out there: It was all a dream—absolute cop-out, and following the series was a waste of time. Purgatory (he died in the accident)—absolute cop-out, and following the series was a waste of time.

My interpretation is better.

There is however one change I would have made to the ending to remove the ambiguity —I would have tagged on a final scene after the end credits where he's sitting in the prison cell from the red reality (minus the colour cast) but with the cuts and bruises on his face from the green reality, wearing a wristband of ambiguous colour, catatonically staring into space. Maybe a prison officer could escort in some nice people in white coats, saying "he's just been sitting like this for days, won't eat anything, won't respond at all...". Cuts to black. Sound at all familiar? Fans of Terry Gilliam will recognise this as the final scene of Brazil. It worked there, and it would have worked here too. This scene is vital because it tells us three important things:

1. Everything that happened so far was real, insofar as it had been filtered through a psychosis—it isn't the consequence-free luxury of all having been in his head; the stuff actually happened, just not quite how he saw it happen.
2. The two realities resulted from a fragmented psyche. They were two parallel interpretations of the same reality.
3. As of now, he's gone into full psychosis and is totally removed from the real world.

But that's just me. I think intentionally ambiguous endings (where the writer has not decided either way) tend to be weak if not done well. A "what happens next?" "they're doomed either way" scenario like you find at the end of The Italian Job or Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is fine. We don't need to know, and it's amusing to see that after all their antics, they've finally manoeuvred themselves into a corner. Inception takes a different approach. The deliberate choice to cut the film 2 or 3 frames early was to blur the difference between everything happening the way we expected or everything not having happened the way we expected. Given the nature of the film (that the vast majority of it hadn't happened at all anyway), this was appropriate and didn't ruin the experience. Awake though… did any of it even happen? It's kind of important to know that sort of stuff.

No Such Thing as an Alternate Universe

Dear Google.

Actually, Dear pretty much everyone in the English speaking world. Especially Google though.

The words "alternate" and "alternative" have different meanings and usages. One is not interchangeable with the other. "Alternate" is not an alternative for "alternative". You cannot alternate between the two at will.

"Alternate" is primarily a verb. It means to go back and forth from one thing to another.

"Alternate" is also an adjective, but can only be used with nouns in the plural. It means "every other".

"Alternate" does not mean an additional option. You cannot have an "alternate universe" or an "alternate calendar" any more than you can raise a pigs, or french dig good carburettor any at those extraordinariness rebound buffer-links breathmint flubleglasticatude. The word you're looking for is "alternative". Please use this in future.

Thank you. You do not need to reply directly.

Music Then & Now

Everybody seems to have an opinion on how music has gotten worse over the decades, using the likes of Bieber and Black to prove their point. Fact is, there's always been great music written and performed by talented artists with inspiring lyrics, and there's always been mind-bendingly awful trite that has no business anywhere near a microphone. The difference between then and now though is that nobody (willingly) remembers the trite from then, because, why would they when they have the classics to fall back on?! Everyone knows the trite from now because it's current, and in another decade people are going to think back to the likes of Kasabian, Gotye, Muse, Coldplay (to be fair), P J Harvey, Kings of Leon, Pink, The White Stripes, Kaiser Chiefs, Ed Sheeran, The Maccabees, Noah and the Whale, The Killers, Arctic Monkey, OK Go etc. and remember fondly what a great era for music the early 21st century was (and how crap current music is by comparison).

Charlie Brooker on Japanese TV

Charlie Brooker, currently in Japan, wrote an excellent piece in which he gave a graphic description of Japanese TV. The following summed it up rather well I thought:

The vast majority of programmes consist of several seriously overexcited people sitting in an overlit studio decorated like a novelty grotto made from regurgitated Dolly Mixture, endlessly babbling about food.

That said, I don't think it went nearly far enough in describing just how goddamned awful it really is.

One of the biggest problems is that TV never really evolved as a visual media, which is ironic given that all national terrestrial channels currently broadcast in high definition. The content of programming is largely an evolution from talk radio, the role of visuals being auxiliary illustration. They can't just show you something; popular personalities have to explain to you what you're seeing, and then discuss their reactions to it. The show format would work without showing us anything, and would probably in fact work better.

What makes the programming worse though is that the talent agencies hold all the cards, and wield those cards without any thought for the quality of the viewing experience. A common scenario is that a production team will approach an agency to hire a particular talent, but if the agency is pushing a different talent that week then that's the one they get. Hence we constantly see the same few faces appearing in everything, regardless of their suitability. Where this goes beyond mere insanity and enters the realm of self destructivity is the following common scenario. An actor has a major part in a high budget TV drama (or occasionally movie), so to plug the movie they have the actor dress up as the character they portray on all other television appearances, which has the knock-on effect of destroying the credibility of the character when the show eventually airs. Just to knock down any last remnants of the fourth wall though, all the advertisers that have used that actor in a commercial opt to air those commercials during the breaks.

This is why Japanese TV is for the most part utterly unwatchable.