spodgod

Made-up statistics suggest that 43% of all Internet communication is the simple recitation and repetition of catchphrases, script snippets and sketches from popular TV programmes.  I’m not taking about random usage either – there are specific scenes, phrases, words and even syntactical structures that attain totemic significance.  See my previous entry “Banned Phrases of 2008” for examples.
 
If you were to peruse the archives of this blog – you would soon discover that I am both irked and fascinated by this phenomenon.  On the one hand, the process of memetic saturation and subsequent loss of meaning is a perfect model of post-modernity.  On the other, the presumption on the part of the poster that the simple cut and paste repetition of iconic phrases is automatically hilarious make me want to use IP location tools to track them down, squirt butane on their pets and set them alight.

 The latest manifestation I’ve noticed is this:

1. Do X
2. ???
3. Profit!

A quick Google reveals that this is a quotation from an episode of South Park called “Gnomes”, in which the titular characters steal underpants for profit.  At one point their business plan is revealed to be:

1. Steal underpants
2. ?
3. Profit

In its original context, I’m sure this was hilarious.   I wouldn’t know as I haven’t watched South Park since about 2003. However, when you’ve seen the same thing 132 times in one morning scattered across various Digg, Slashdot and LiveJournal threads, that initial jocularity wears off.  Also, note the increased number of question marks and the addition of an exclamation point in the ersatz version.  As everyone knows, extra punctuation makes everything funnier – if you’re a twat.

Why does this happen?  My hypothesis is that the appropriation of catch phrases from popular culture is more than just a simple substitute for invention.  Children in playgrounds the world over repeat and re-enact their favourite bits from the shows they watched the night before.  Adults in British pubs parrot Peter Kay’s stand up act, finding the words “garlic bread” unnaturally hilarious when three pints south of sober.

These are both acts of cultural bonding – looking for common experience and values in their peers.  And while the Internet equivalent is partially marked by social ineptitude, it is similarly born of a desire to belong – to be part of a group.  In other words:

1.  Repeat comedic phrase made popular on TV or YouTube
2. ?
3. Profit

Remember my super previous posting “Banned Phrases of 2007″.  Well this is exactly the same, but for 2008.  DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?  By the way, what I just said?  That’s one of them… These are now all officially old news…

“Fail.” 

“I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.”  (EDIT: Also, the related but so far not quite as much used “I laughed so hard a little bit of wee came out.”)

“Anything-tard (examples “webtard”, “freetard”, “douchetard” etc)

“Im in ur (x) (doing y) to ur (z)”.

“The cake is a lie”. (or any quote from “Portal” – especially those quoting the lyrics of the song at the end ;”This was a triumph! I’m making a note here… Huge Success!” etc)

“I drink your milkshake.” (A phrase that has, in its overusage, put me off seeing a movie that I would have otherwise crawled over broken dinosaur teeth to see).

“I call shenanigans/BS.”

“Pwned.”

/ The use of slashes to punctuate.
// Like this.
/// Popular with Farkers, don’t you know.

“Video or it didn’t happen.”

Please feel free to dispute my choices or offer your own.

What would you do if your Mac refused to start Finder and dropped you into Darwin, it’s UNIX  command prompt? Panic? Scream?  Swear?  Or would you smugly take out your restore disk, slot it into your machine and restart, holding down “C” so that you could boot from the DVD and perform an Archive and Install?

That’s what I did today – except that the machine wouldn’t actually boot from the DVD.  Then I panicked, screamed and swore.  I tried bypassing the startup drive,  zapping the PRAM… all that startup shortcut good stuff.  I fixed permissions, repaired and rebuilt the drive – everything the Mac-heads on assorted forums told other folks in similar situations to do. Nothing worked.  I kept getting dumped back into Darwin.  I tried to mount the DVD manually.  No luck.  I could log in, see my files and see the system.  I just couldn’t start Finder – and the Internet didn’t want to tell me how…

I threw the Mac Mini into a satchel and got the bus to my brother’s house (because, ironically, the computer that governs my car’s immobiliser has crashed too).  First order of business was to recover files from the machine.  We did this by launching a second, working Mac Mini in FireWire target disk mode (holding down “T” at startup) and connecting it to my Mac.  I then started my machine and logged into Darwin.  We then looked at it.

“What do we do next?” I said.

“Maybe if we took a look at the logs we could see what went wrong,”

This, my friends, was an inspired idea.  It was this idea that lead to our solution.  But not in the way you might think…

I found a file, named “logfile.txt” and using the little UNIX I remember from setting up web servers and the old days of anonymous FTP I typed:

sudo open logfile.txt

I fully expected the file to open in vi… but it didn’t.  It booted the Finder and opened in TextEdit!  Nothing else was running – just the Finder and TextEdit – but it was enough for us to get the foothold we needed.  From there we were able to launch System Preferences from the Apple menu and select the Startup Disk pane.  The DVD drive was still invisible – but the FireWire target mode Mini we’d attached to back up my machine wasn’t.  We set the machine to boot from the fully intact OS on the second mini and rebooted.

Five minutes later we were looking at my brother’s OS running on my machine.  I slotted a full Mac OS restore CD in the DVD drive and executed the installer in the Finder.   At reboot I made sure to select the correct target drive and chose “Archive and Install” to replace the old system and back it up.  Then we went for lunch.  By the time we got home, full of cheese and bagels, my crocked Mini was running happily under it’s own steam.

Crisis over.  I hope this post might help others in a similar situation. 

Microsoft are beta testing a document sharing and viewing service that integrates directly with your desktop version of Office.  Office Live Workspace is sort of like Google Docs, except you have to buy £300 worth of desktop software to use it, because there are no online editing tools.  What you do get is some space where you can post Office documents and Outlook data and a handy plug-in that enables you to save files direct to your online repository.  There were blog mumblings before the launch that MS was about to birth a full version of Office online – competing comprehensively with Google’s growing roster of productivity offerings.  What we’ve actually got is a halfway house.  Office owners can effectively move much of their work online with this beta – especially if they’re already integrating Outlook with Live Hotmail.  If you’re looking for an alternative to the desktop suite though, you’re out of luck.  Better go and check out Zoho or ThinkFree instead.

Fan produced Star Trek series Phase II may not be as fannish as it first seemed. A statement issued by director Marc Zicree suggests a level of professional involvement in the “franchise” that was previously unsuspected…

Star Trek fans can’t get enough of their favourite show. There are ten movies already, with a high profile $160 million new project on the way, 600 TV episodes, a gazillion novels and a bunch of comics. And yet, fans still want more – so they make their own Star Trek.

Filmed with high resolution digital cameras on authentic looking replica sets, Star Trek: Phase II (previously known as New Voyages) takes over where the original Star Trek ended – co-opting the name that Gene Roddenbury chose for his failed attempt to revive the original series on the small screen. Playing out the archetypal fan fantasy, a plucky bunch of Trek-nerds recast themselves as their Sci-Fi heroes, facing the same jeopardy, saying the same lines, wearing the same velour jerseys and ill-fitting trousers as the original Kirk, Spock and McCoy.

Phase II isn’t the only Trek fan film on the block. Star Trek: Exeter and Star Trek: Hidden Frontier are also contenders as fan favourites. Still, the “series” which has so far released four episodes, is eminently notable for the talent it attracts. Former Chekov actor Walter Koenig appeared in the Dorothy Fontana penned episode To Serve All My Days. That’s the same DC Fontana who acted as script editor on the original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Though the first two episodes of New Voyages were decidedly shaky, with amateur acting, fan fiction narratives and poor CGI, the series came on several leaps and bounds with the Fontana penned episode. There were outstanding performances from Koenig and young actor Andy Bray, both playing Ensign Pavel Chekov. Production values rose to match the quality of the script and talent on screen.

The latest entry, World Enough and Time stars George Takei reprising his role as helmsman Sulu and was written by former DS9 scribes Marc Zicree and Michael Reeves. The episode was so well received that it won a TV Guide award for best web based media – up against Lost and Battlestar Galactica. The screenplay has been nominated for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s of America’s highest trinket – the Nebula, in the same category as the Doctor Who episode “Blink” and dark fantasy “Pan’s Labyrinth”.

And there the controversy begins.

There’s a dispute bubbling among SFWA members as to the professional legitimacy of Star Trek:Phase II. From an outside perspective the argument seems a bit churlish – opponents say that World Enough… isn’t a professional production so it shouldn’t be eligible at all. One of the loudest voices is Keith R.A. DeCandido, a science fiction writer who specialises in tie-in novels – a category that the Nebulas have traditionally shown antipathy towards. In a post on his LiveJournal blog, Candido says:

“Look, this isn’t a knock on the fan films as such. But that’s what they are — they’re fan films. They are not professionally produced. What’s more, they’re unauthorized and, by the letter of the law, illegal. In fact, one of the reasons why they’re not prosecuted, is because they don’t turn a profit, which is one of the legion of ways that they’re not professionally produced…”

Now World Enough and Time director Marc Zicree has weighed in with his point of view in a statement prepared for the SFWA. The argument he constructs is interesting in itself… but what’s more interesting is how incredibly candid he is about how connected Phase II actually is. The show’s fannish producers, lead by Kirk actor James Cawley, have traditionally been tight lipped about the privileged position Phase II/New Voyages enjoys with the studio. Not Marc Zicree.

He tells us that World Enough and Time was produced with the full co-operation and knowledge of Paramount and CBS (from “Business Affairs on down”), that he was given directorial advice by no less than J.J. Abrams while shooting the show and that several key personnel were paid for their involvement – including George Takei, and Zicree himself. The show had many professional crew members on board, hired by Zicree’s own production company, including a professional editor, Chris Cronin, who worked at industry rates. He lists a couple dozen more cast and crew members, each with extensive working credentials, some with Emmy and other awards to their names. He also mentions that a day of shooting actually took place on the Universal lot.

This ultimately begs the question we began with; is Star Trek: Phase II/New Voyages the first professional fan film? When your free, web released movie uses copyrighted characters, but is endorsed by CBS and Paramount; when it features fans in acting roles alongside Trek alumni; when amateur producers rub shoulders with directors who worked on Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation – where do you draw the line?

Here at Den of Geek we think Star Trek: Phase II could actually be the beginning of a new kind of media. The Internet brought these fans together, enabled them to build a profile and pool their resources. Now that technology is moving on and TV studios are taking notice, this fan film series has become a different animal altogether. Like Star Wars tie-in novels and Big Finish audio, Phase II is creeping towards legitimacy as a licensed product.

Our prediction? Watch out for CBS endorsed fan flicks coming to iTunes or a similar outlet soon…

***

Further Viewing:

Keith R.A. DeCandido argues against the inclusion of Star Trek: New Voyages in the Nebula nominations at LiveJournal.

Marc Zicree’s rebuttal and statement for the SFWA is available in full on Lee Whitehouse’s SFTV blog.

Three episodes of Star Trek: New Voyages are available for download. Future episodes will adopt the Phase II monicker. The first outing “Come What May” is no longer being distributed and we recommend giving “In Harm’s Way a wide berth, but “To Serve all my Days” and “World Enough and Time” are as close to classic Trek as makes no difference on a wet Sunday afternoon… See them here: www.startreknewvoyages.com

Star Trek: Exeter works on a much slower schedule than New Voyages, but their current episode “The Tressaurian Intersection” captures the spirit of Star Trek’s original series better than any other. An earlier episode and the first bits of teh second are available at www.exeterstudio.com

Another fan film full of former Trek actors is Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. Directed by Tim “Tuvok” Russ and starring Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig and Alan Ruck, it should be more “professional” than New Voyages. It’s lovely to see so many Trek alumni on screen, but awful to hear them spout such truly terrible dialogue. And the plot? We’ve already seen Yesterday’s Enterprise, Mirror Mirror, Charlie X and City on the Edge of Forever. Great episodes on their own, but unpalatable when put in a blender and whizzed up into a fan-wank smoothie. Still, worth a look for curiosity value. Catch it at www.startrekofgodsandmen.com

(This entry was originally published at Den of Geek)

When I look at this image, I wish it had been rendered and presented in a 3D format I could grab, rotate and zoom in on… There’s just too much detail to glean at this paltry resolution – even though you’ll get a bigger image if you click through:

It comes from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, as reported previously over at Discover magazine – and shows Internet connected hubs over a period of two weeks in 2007.

“Tracing the circumference clockwise corresponds to moving from east to west. Each square represents a data hub, which lines up on a spoke with the city in which it is registered. The closer to the center it lies, the more data it traffics.”

Digging deeper, there are earlier animated versions of the graph/map – showing the flux in traffic to specific hubs over a period of two years.

Funniest thing of 2008, so far…

As someone who makes a serviceable if paltry living out of writing for various magazines, news that Google plan to get into publishing would seem on the surface to be cause for celebration.

Ah… but is it? IS IT? The answer is, probably not yet. Perhaps. Oh, let’s stop whipping the perimeter of that Bonsai eh? No one really has a clue what they’re up to.

What we do know for definite is that the great Google, masters of the Internet, owners of your first born’s first born, have filed a patent for a system that enables users to create custom print magazines filled with content of their choice and, crucially, targeted advertising.

It’s an interesting concept, disassembling the magazine format and tailoring it to user choice. From Google’s point of view, it’s another medium to sell advertising into – and it’s our guess that’s why they’re involved.

Predictably, some SEO bloggers have gotten into quite a lather about this, going all gooey and space age about the possibility of future magazines you can make yourself. You can have the review section of Empire without the tediously subjective top ten lists. Your DIY newspaper might be full of sport results and lacking in Britney coverage. So far, so libertarian.

Call me old fashioned. Call me a brown teapot or a penny farthing – but I’m not sure that’s such a super idea. I love me some magazines – and one of the things I love most about them is discovering the stuff I didn’t know I wanted to know. The new band interview that made me go out and buy the CD, the David Shrigley cartoon that lead me down his gravity well of madness or the Jon Ronson feature about religious extremists that I never would have Googled.

If we become editors of our own magazines, then who will discover this stuff for us? Is that our job now? Because, cha, that’s one of the reasons I buy magazines – so I don’t have to go looking for things I just might like.

Internet browsing is one (rhizomic, chaotic, organic, spontaneous) experience, reading magazines is another (finite, authoritative, linear, planned). I turn to magazines to be mollycoddled and comforted, stimulated and enlightened. I turn to the Internet for deep background and reference, chance and happenstance.

Of course, there’s another thing that concerns me – and that’s my job. But that’s a matter whose complexity is better suited for another entry…

A story about Internet dating that’s actually worth reading:

The Life and Death of Jesse James

In today’s Guardian, there’s a Q and A with Aimee Mann, which includes these reactionary snippets:

What’s the greatest threat to music?
Music downloads and CD burning.  If music is free, then the only people who can afford to make it are narcissistic jackasses who will do anything for attention.

Is the Internet a good thing for music?
It’s good for information, but pages like MySpace turn everyone into a musician, almost all of them terrible.  It’s as if people think there are bundles of money lying around, when actually becoming a musician is a drastic choice.

In other news, Kate Nash, who found pre-signing fame through MySpace, has the UK’s current number one single; “Foundations“.  She writes and records using GarageBand on an Apple Mac – an accessible sample sequencing program bundled free with the machine…  

So which camp are you in? Kate Nash or Aimee Mann?  Internet DIY or corporate grafter?

Me? I’m with Marshall McLuhan:

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. (…)  The amateur can afford to lose.  The professional tends to classify and specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. 

Aimee Mann peddles the old trouper schtick that if you practice hard and have talent, if you graft and put in the hours, you will be noticed.  If that happens the end result is acceptance into the old order; the corporate music industry.  To do what though?  To fit within the parameters of that industry, where deviation from set templates – the environmental rules - is allowed only in incremental degrees.

The net has the potential to allow artists to sidestep the hours, the graft and the old order.  And those artists, though ostensibly still aping the same popular idioms as their “professional” peers, don’t have to follow the same rules.  Waiting for punk to happen again?  It’s happening right now.