The Ice Planet

Not once does the word “innocent” appear in the Ministry of Justice’s 161-page proposal to remove legal aid from defendants. The British right is no more troubled by the notion that citizens are innocent until proved guilty than it is by the thought that wealth should not determine access to the law, or that the police can fit up suspects or that the state can behave unjustly and that the best way to keep it honest is to expose it to constant scrutiny.

You hear the powerful’s impatience with accountability everywhere in the statements of ministers. “What we mustn’t do is just leave untouched a system that has grown astonishingly, making the poor extremely litigious,” said Ken Clarke when he was justice secretary. Defendants don’t need a “Rolls-Royce” service, says his successor, Chris Grayling. Trust the benevolence of the bureaucracy, they seem to whisper. Believe in its procedures. No one but cunning criminals or greedy lawyers objects to protecting it from challenge in the courts.

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by Nick Cohen at June 17, 2013 02:37 PM

The guys are joined by The Media Show’s Karl Madden to discuss all the happenings during the WWDC keynote and all the creamy goodness of iOS7

 

Show notes for iOS 022

by britishtechnetwork at June 13, 2013 08:20 AM

Heaven high. It’s episode 137 of Rum Doings, in which we don’t discuss man moon cold blah blah. We do discuss privacy, and our easily misinterpreted innocent statements. For some reason we talk about aeroplane classes, and their relation to capitalism. John does his extraordinary impression of Frank Muller, and then we consider the genius of Sir Jonathan Ive.

Can you say you’ve read something if you’ve listened to it? And will the blind destroy us all? And is youthwork worthwhile?

We’d really love it if you left a review on iTunes. Yes, iTunes is hideous, but reviews on there are what get podcasts more attention. After 137 free episodes, we’d love you to return the favour by writing a quick review.

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by John Walker at June 12, 2013 08:52 AM

Have you heard? Do you know? Are you, as they say, ‘in the loop’? When the Mail on Sunday said a ‘sensational affair’ between ‘high profile figures’ close to Cameron had ‘rocked’ No. 10, did you have the faintest idea what it was talking about?

I did, but then I’m a journalist. Friends in the lobby filled me in on a story which had been doing the rounds for months. I even know which law stopped the Mail on Sunday following the basics of journalism and giving its readers the ‘whos’, ‘whats’, ‘whens’, ‘whys’ and ‘hows’. (Although with most affairs the ‘whys’ are self-evident. It is the ‘whos’ and, for the voyeuristic, the ‘whats’ and the ‘hows’ that stir the blood.) I cannot say any more in print. I cannot even tell you which restriction on freedom of speech is stopping publication. If I did, you might just be able to work out the names of the lovers.

by Nick Cohen at June 11, 2013 09:51 AM

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is meant to protect against “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind”. The conscience of mankind, however, has become remarkably forgiving of late.

What can outrage it? Not the 80,000 dead, according to the UN (a minimum of 94,000, says the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights). Not the 1.5 million the war has driven into exile in poverty-stricken camps, where families sell their daughters to dirty old men to pay for food. Not the United Nations, which last week talked of soldiers forcing children to watch the torture and murder of their parents and concluded that, while all sides were guilty of war crimes, rebel actions did not “reach the intensity and scale” of the massacres committed by government forces.

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by Nick Cohen at June 10, 2013 10:51 AM

Heaven high. It’s episode 136 of Rum Doings, in which we don’t discuss why there are so many repeats. We begin by answering a few Facebook (eurgh) questions, and then settle into some lovely discussion of sun cream,
Nick’s desperation for John to get drunk, Judith’s ludicrously complicated songs, and a female Doctor Who.

There’s a painstaking review of the Chocolate Boutique Hotel, and the arrival of the monstrous noise of next door’s loft conversion. Then we encourage bigots to shoot themselves in the head.

We’d really love it if you left a review on iTunes. Yes, iTunes is hideous, but reviews on there are what get podcasts more attention. After 130 free episodes, we’d love you to return the favour by writing a quick review.

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by John Walker at June 03, 2013 11:18 AM

Respectable opinion is less keen on pointing out that the old certainties no longer apply. As my colleague Dan Boffey reports on the Observer’s news pages, this recession is different. Not just because of globalisation or technological change but because of the decisions of leaders who have been so captured by the financial elite that they no longer put the interests of the broad mass of people first.

Since 2010, 38,000 more high-fliers have moved into the £150,000-£500,000 wage band. Six thousand more have pocketed between £500,000 and £1m. And 8,000 more have received salaries of more than £1m. Britain can now boast that it has more people in the £1m-plus bracket than at any time since records began. Good luck to them, one might have said, if their wealth were trickling down. But barely a drop is falling. The rising tide, which once promised to lift all boats, has ebbed – and left the majority stranded.

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by Nick Cohen at June 02, 2013 10:49 AM

During one of the royal pageants that periodically choke the streets of London, a conservatively dressed American approached me.

“You must be so proud,” she trilled, and she became quite truculent when I told her I felt nothing but shame. “How can you hate your country?” she snapped. “What’s the matter with you?” “I don’t hate my country,” I replied, “and there’s nothing the matter with me. Like you, I am a republican.”

Foreigners rarely realize that British republicans have always opposed monarchy because they love their country and want to end the humiliation of a Hanoverian state’s smothering our best democratic impulses.

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by Nick Cohen at June 01, 2013 07:47 AM

One from the archives…

by rodti at May 31, 2013 09:12 PM

For no good reason other than to inconvenience my one remaining reader I have uprooted this blog and recklessly discarded it at blog.interfunt.com. This is the most exciting thing that will happen here for some time.

Crazy!

by rodti at May 31, 2013 08:42 PM

They’re running Julie Bailey out of town. The poison pen letters, foul-mouthed phone calls, slashed tyres, shit through the letterbox, boycott of her cafe and attacks on her mother’s grave have become too much.

Stafford’s upstanding citizens, or a good number of them, want her gone. So she is leaving her home and business, and looking for a better place.

‘People come up to me in the street and just start bawling,’ she told me. ‘I can’t go out by myself. I always need someone with me”

Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at May 31, 2013 08:30 AM

A few weeks ago, Sean O’Neill, the crime correspondent of The Times, claimed that Lord Hope, the former Archbishop of York, had covered up allegations that a senior Anglican clergyman had abused choirboys and school pupils.

You have to have worked in a newsroom to know how hard it is to break a story like that. How do you get victims to talk to you? How do you know whether you can trust them? Accusations of sexual abuse are hard to prove. In the absence of forensic evidence, impossible to find years after the alleged event, they often come down to “he says, she says” or in the case of many paedophiles, “he says, he says.” Then there are Britain’s ferocious libel laws to navigate.

Nevertheless, O’Neill stood-up the story, and went home convinced that he and The Times would receive some credit for publishing. The next morning the Today programme reported: “It has emerged that the former Archbishop of York had covered up allegations that a senior Anglican clergyman had abused choirboys and school pupils.”

Emerged? Does the BBC think that stories appear like rocks at low tide? Does it imagine that passers-by can point their fingers and say, “Oh look, evidence of corrupt political donations has emerged”?

Carry on reading

by Nick Cohen at May 30, 2013 11:59 AM

With the predictability of acne spreading on a teenager’s face, the British right and left used the ritual slaughter of Lee Rigby to confirm what they already knew. The security establishment called for the revival of its pet project to allow spies to engage in blanket web surveillance without saying why it would have helped. For the “anti-imperialist” left and Greens, who have never wanted to look clerical fascism in the eye for fear of what they may see, the attack told them that the west was to blame – as it always must be.

Neither could accept that political violence is mutating in ways that give past cliches a musty smell. For the first time since 9/11, the similarities between violent movements in the west are more important than their differences.

Carry on reading

by Nick Cohen at May 27, 2013 11:24 AM

While common sense should assume that the Games Media Awards is incapable of doing anything without making it a murky, dubious mess, I really didn’t see how they could make a new student prize something awful. But their abilities know no boundaries.

This year there are definitely some claimed improvements. They’ve stopped PRs from voting in most categories, which is something I’ve appealed for since the awards first began. And they’ve got rid of the “goodybags”, which contained hundreds of pounds worth of items and were given to every winner. It’s great that these things are gone.

What hasn’t changed is that it’s an evening funded by publishers and PRs, in which they provide the games journalists who report on them with free food and limitless free drink, and then present them with awards sponsored by themselves. It’s promoted as a piss-up, and it has, for years, been the British games industry at its most tawdry, wretched, and dubious. From the first year’s awarding of prizes to magazines owned by the sponsors of the categories, to the despicable antics of two years ago with the Grainger Games sponsorship, to last year’s disgraceful mess of journalists tweeting adverts for games to win a Playstation, it has always been a horror show. That it has cleaned up a fraction of its act is progress, but it’s certainly not anything for celebration. That most of the UK games industry will still happily trundle along for the free booze, no matter how it associates them with it all, is hugely demoralising.

Picture nicked from the Guardian, showing the dancers at the strip club in which the first GMA took place.

And this year they’ve added the ludicrously named “Games Media Academy”. This pompously grandiose title is really just a prize for a single person – an unpaid hopeful writer – of £1000 of commissions, and some unexplained (and indeed entirely unmentioned by the actual description at the bottom of the page) “mentoring” from “some of the biggest names in games media”.

The prize is to get some paid work.

In an industry that is increasingly screwing over new writers by not paying them, some might want to argue this as a positive step. I’d suggest that’s a bit like giving a trophy to husbands who don’t beat their wives. What it is, in fact, is publishers doing their damned jobs, and pretending it’s something special. It’s like telling a plumber they’ve won the lucky prize that you’ll pay them to fix your sink.

It is a part of every media outlet’s job to find and hire new writers. Submissions arrive to magazines and websites all the time, both solicited and unsolicited. When a publication is looking for new freelancers, or even new employees, they look at these, and they commission based on potential talent they spot. People who are good enough at writing get paid work, and the system continues.

The idea of doing exactly this, but pretending it’s a special prize, simultaneously demeans both the writers submitting their work, and the entire occupation itself. It reduces our job down to a special treat, given out to one lucky person, and a ruffle of their hair. And it reduces potential writers down to entrants in a competition, and then pretends that doing the work that earns the money is some manner of award! It’s outrageous. There is NO prize! They get £1000 for doing £1000 worth of work!

So what is it really? It’s IGN, Future, MCV and bloody Network-N advertising themselves, getting their names mentioned in concert with this extraordinary act of altruism of paying some writers to do a job. The people judging may not have been so cynical in their acceptance – they may simply want to be involved in a process that finds new talent. But unfortunately, as positive as their intentions may (or indeed may not, looking at some of the names) be, they’re associated with the awfulness of the GMAs, and they’re – perhaps unwittingly – part of a non-prize that demeans everyone involved. Oh, and the winning entrants get published in a supplement in trade rag MCV, owned by Intent, who own the GMAs. Will they be paid for that publication? There’s no indication that they will.

(So what should they have done instead? Accepted nominations for a category for unpaid writers, and given the best one an award in the hope of raising their profile. Editors paying attention would look at their work, and if they liked it, commission them. Instead, because this is the GMAs, it’s become about promoting publishers in a faked act of goodwill, bullshitting that paid work is a prize, and insulting everyone involved.)

There is no obligation on anyone in this industry to attend the GMAs. If free drinks mean so much to you, crash a wedding. By walking through those doors, you endorse everything the GMAs have done, and intend to do. And for what? You don’t even get the bag of bribes this year. Please people, just don’t go.

by John Walker at May 24, 2013 11:54 AM

More unusually, the thriller is about an Islamist attack on Britain. Whatever subtleties he offers the reader, Clyde is not frightened of saying that Islamists are an enemy. You should buy this book for that reason alone because very few writers are prepared to be as blunt.

One of the strangest features of mass culture over the past decade has been the near-total break between what thriller writers write and what spies do. Since 9/11, the fight against radical Islam has consumed the time of intelligence services and anti-terrorist police forces. Yet it barely features in spy fiction. The standard plot device remains the enemy within. The Bourne films were the most successful thrillers of the 2000s, and deservedly so. But it was not al Qaeda but corrupt and unscrupulous officers in the CIA, whom Bourne had to fight. In the recent Bond films, 007 is also up against a cabal of western conspirators rather than a plausible foe.

As soon as you see a government minister, or intelligence or police chief in television drama, meanwhile, you need only set your watch and count the minutes until the hero exposes him as the cancer at the heart of society.

Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at May 22, 2013 09:00 AM

Heaven high. It’s episode 135 of Rum Doings, in which we don’t discuss all manner of things that we end up discussing anyway. Including the Conservative’s peculiar backpeddling on gay marriage, the current state of South Africa, and the new-found potency of the cold virus.

There’s some lovely chat about Ferage, and then a review of Eurovision. You can see the 2011 opening ceremony here:

We recall the majesty of Wogan’s Web, the dreariness of Doctor Who, and John’s potential new house.

We’d really love it if you left a review on iTunes. Yes, iTunes is hideous, but reviews on there are what get podcasts more attention. After 130 free episodes, we’d love you to return the favour by writing a quick review.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

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by John Walker at May 20, 2013 01:52 PM

On the edge of Rugeley stands Amazon’s largest distribution centre in Britain. Life for the workers who trudge around the 800,000 sq ft warehouse is not as bad as it was for the men who once worked in the pits of the Staffordshire coalfield, but that is not saying much. They must carry satnavs, which direct their movements round the stacks and flash warnings from managers to stop dawdling or chatting with colleagues. Britain being the way it is, they have no job security.

Trade unionists call the Amazon shed a “slave camp”. But whatever arguments they have with Amazon’s management, one point should be beyond dispute – Rugeley is in Britain. British customers send Amazon their money. British workers package their goods and send them off in vans along roads built and maintained by the British taxpayer. If workers steal – and before they can go home or visit the canteen, they must walk through airport-style security scanners to prove they have not – Amazon will call on the taxpayer-funded police to arrest them and the taxpayer-funded criminal justice system to prosecute them. Admittedly, Amazon’s buyers who supply the stock are based in Slough rather than Rugeley. But the last time I looked Slough was in Britain too.

Carry on reading

by Nick Cohen at May 20, 2013 09:57 AM

This evening I went along to a talk, part of Bristol’s Festival Of Ideas, by geneticist Steve Jones. He’s recently published a book, The Serpent’s Promise, in which he reinterprets the Bible as a science book. It’s not as spurious as it sounds, although I’ve not read the book yet – Jones is an atheist, and was interested to investigate whether there’s any science to be found in the books, and to reinterpret the pseudo-science and historical claims it makes. Which sounds tremendous, so Laura and I went along.

The talk itself, in which Jones answered questions from a host, was a good time. It was a touch lacking in depth, a little heavy on the “buy the book in the foyer after” and a little light on the meat. But an enjoyable evening nonetheless.

One particular comment really stood out to me. It was a response to a question about whether religion made people happier, in which he explained that the data he’s seen showed that no, in fact religion fails to make people happier. Those who identify as agnostic or atheist tend to identify as happier.

And I realised a part of where this debate is going so wrong. Obviously the “Science vs Religion” discussions are far too often between those who wish to “oppose science in the name of religion” and “oppose religion in the name of science”, as if either were anything less than mad. But it’s understandable! Because the religiosity that’s presenting itself is one that absolutely should be attacked by those of a rational, scientific mind.

During Jones’ talk, it became very apparent that the version of Christianity he’s experienced, and the version that others have expressed to him, absolutely merits the dismissal and refuting it receives. A Christian doctrine that proselytises on the basis of offering “happiness” is fundamentally unrelated to the faith on which they claim to be based. Christianity sold as everything from a means to escape the pits of hell to a self-help cure for the lacklustre is a heretical misinterpretation of the most serious magnitude. This is perpetuated by both the intentionally malevolent, usually with a financial and/or power-based incentive, and the ideologically naive, people who very genuinely want to help spread something they believe to be good. This “Christianity”, the one that makes people happier, entirely merits the scorn it receives from the scientific community, and absolutely deserves to be found as lacking under any scrutiny.

It’s just, that’s not Christianity.

In fact, it’s such a warped understanding of the faith that it becomes ultimately destructive. It makes perfect sense that societies with this as their basis – and indeed so many Christian nations are – should be the most unstable, the most cruel, the least socially advanced. Because it’s a religion of self-fulfilment, of achievement over others, of intrinsic hedonism, and ultimately of selfishness. Whether the basis of your religion is to protect yourself from some non-specific eternal damnation, or to reach some sense of internal enlightenment and satisfaction, it’s narcissism, and utterly without basis in the teachings of Jesus. It by its nature is inherently “them” and “us”, insiders and outsiders, acceptable and unacceptable. It breeds inequality – it strives for it.

Christianity never offers “happiness”. Such a spurious and delusional notion would be meaningless to offer anyway. To achieve a state of fixed happiness would require the complete abandoning of any notions of sympathy, empathy or social awareness – in other words, it is to be a sociopath. To exist in such a way that the horrors affecting others no longer impact on your state of mind is to be dangerously delusional, and deeply hideous. Anything that promises you “happiness” is automatically to be deeply feared.

Christianity, in fact, promises a greater lack of this notion of happiness. When people approached Jesus and asked him what they needed to do to follow him, he invariably responded by saying, “Give up the thing that makes you happy.” This wasn’t self-flagellation, or some cult-like stripping of someone until they were dependent upon the leader. This was, simply, sacrifice. It was about taking away the meaningless trinkets that delude you into believing you are content, and facing the brutal reality of life, such that you would be finally in a position to do something about it. Jesus didn’t say, “Follow me and you’ll feel better.” He said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” That is, pick up the instrument of torture on which you will ultimately die in misery and pain, and follow me. Who’s up for following now?! This Christianity is about learning the joy of responding to suffering. It is a rejection of “happiness”, “contentment”, “wholeness”, or however else it’s sold, in favour of experiencing love as a transforming action.

So the question at the beginning of it all begins to look so farcical. Christianity is questioned as to whether it is “really succeeding” for people, by a measure of whether it makes them more happy. And is found lacking. Of course it is, although mostly for the worst reason. Mostly it’s because people who have been sold this heretical religion, this Christianity that cures your melancholy and plasters a smile upon your face, and it cannot possibly succeed. Because it’s dishonest, unrealistic, and plain grotesque. It’s a lie. Those who join in with the hope of happiness are certainly going to feel let down. Of course they’re not going to be demonstrably more “happy” than the secular.

Let alone those who respond to Christianity on the basis of what it actually offers: a stark, painful truth. To follow Jesus, to “be a Christian”, is to live a life in which you are fundamentally aware of inequality, injustice, and cruelty, such that you are in a position to respond to it. To see every human being as created and loved by God is not to see a world made of rainbow-sprouting clouds and especially bouncy bunnies. It’s to see so many of those created and loved beings living in horror, and to feel the weight of that. It’s to sacrifice to option to dismiss the poorest around you as “scum” or “scroungers”. It’s to sacrifice the ability to delude yourself into believing that the brown kids with flies on their eyes aren’t actually the same as you. It’s to sacrifice the false comfort of calling paedophiles “monsters” and dehumanising the most abhorrent amongst us. Is that going to make anyone happier? Of course not.

(I want to stress that Christianity is obviously not a necessity for someone to recognise the horrors in the world, and nor is it at all necessary to be someone who lovingly responds to it. The point is that it is required for those calling themselves Christians to see and respond, if they are to have any understanding of the faith they purport to live in.)

(I also want to stress that living with a Christian faith isn’t abject misery. It is also to live knowing the love of God, which is fairly fundamental. It’s just, if someone experiences that love, and then isn’t driven to damn well go fix the stuff that’s wrong, to have a greater perspective of just how wrong the wrong things are, then they’re not following Jesus at all.)

The question asked of Steve Jones tonight should have been, “Do you think that religion is succeeding in making Christians appropriately unhappy?” And Steve Jones should have been able to respond, “No! It isn’t! It is taught as either self-help or as a consequence of fear, and exists in the self-delusion that it is achieving anything in doing so, ignorant of all rational, scientific understanding of the human condition.”

Of course the secular scientific community thinks that Christianity is demonstrably failing in its apparently intended goals, even before they get to the impossible and unproductive discussions of attempting to disprove the unprovable. And of course such a deluded, reactionary, and ultimately ignorant religion reacts to the scientific community with fear and hate – they can barely cope with maintaining their own façade of “happiness”, let alone with these other people poking at it from the outside.

Meanwhile there is a Christianity being practised by very many that has no aspirations toward delusions of happiness, and funnily enough also isn’t driven to distraction by arguing against those discovering the wonder of the cosmos, the phenomena of genetics, the impossible joy of the atom, the mysteries of string theory, the issues of global climate change, and the extraordinary, beautiful nature of evolution.

by John Walker at May 18, 2013 12:40 AM

Heaven high. It’s episode 134 of Rum Doings, in which we don’t discuss whether it’s time for someone stood up for the rights of the white, hetrosexual male. But we do discuss John’s cold, and then a worrying return to cream teas. We explain why some people can’t be followed on Twitter, and then have a nice discussion about that nice boy, Justin Bieber. And John puts a hit out on Mark Kermode.

We announce plans to close down the Lake District, give away far too many personal details about ourselves, and predict our future leader, Prime Minister Wibblywob, leader of the Spoil Party. And once more we find ourselves upset by the ages of celebrities.

We’d really love it if you left a review on iTunes. Yes, iTunes is hideous, but reviews on there are what get podcasts more attention. After 130 free episodes, we’d love you to return the favour by writing a quick review.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

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by John Walker at May 08, 2013 09:47 AM

This week the guys discuss… well nothing according to Tim Cook.  We also chat about iMessage’s self censorship and the iBeetle!

by britishtechnetwork at May 04, 2013 11:37 AM

Heaven high. It’s episode 133 of Rum Doings, in which we don’t discuss whether pensioners should donate their bus passes to charity. Instead we somnambulistically chatter about sleep, poo Braille, and periods. Then Nick begins a sizeable lecture on Bach. No, don’t be scared, it’s good. Here are the links you’ll need, if you have Spotify access. Compare this with this. And this with this. And here’s Chi-Chi Nwanoku.

We express our lifelong dismay that we never married cello players, John regales his anthropological journey into ITV, and we laugh in horror at UKIP. And then we explain in detail how everything is the fault of the immigrants, especially the one that is Nick.

We’d really love it if you left a review on iTunes. Yes, iTunes is hideous, but reviews on there are what get podcasts more attention. After 130 free episodes, we’d love you to return the favour by writing a quick review.

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by John Walker at April 30, 2013 09:55 AM

Heaven high. It’s episode 132 of Rum Doings, in which we don’t discuss whether teachers should stop teaching their liberal views of history. Instead we talk about the latest news in the Boston bombings, as insensitively as you might expect. And even more insensitively, the funeral of Her Royal Highness Queen Margaret Thatcher.

We learn why Nick passionately believes in the healing power of beetroot, science’s early weekend, and pupils copping off with teachers. Then we conclude by deciding to enter a polygamous Swedish marriage and Nick dies.

We’d really love it if you left a review on iTunes. Yes, iTunes is hideous, but reviews on there are what get podcasts more attention. After 130 free episodes, we’d love you to return the favour by writing a quick review.

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by John Walker at April 19, 2013 05:27 PM

Today Ben Kuchera, of the Penny Arcade Report, wrote an article in which he explained how games journalism works in relation to content and advertising. That gaming sites put up the galleries of cosplay babes because it’s necessary to fund the better, less popular content, all driven by a constant need for pageviews and unique hits. In his article, he writes as if he’s speaking for the whole industry, although excludes himself from the process. I’d like to add RPS to that exclusion list, thanks very much, because I don’t recognise a word of how he says my business works.

I’m not going to get into how RPS’s advertising works, because frankly I don’t know, and I prefer it that way. That’s all done by someone who works at Eurogamer, with whom we have an advertising partnership. We have laid down strict rules, they follow them, but how the charging works I’ve no idea.

Kuchera makes a few statements which I want to make clear don’t speak for me, or the business I co-own.

“People like to say that the games press is just chasing page views with certain stories, but let’s be honest: We’re chasing page views with every story.”

This is a very loaded statement. It’s both as banal as saying “Newspapers only include news stories because people want to read news,” and as sensationalist as saying, “They’ll do anything to make you click!” The truth is of course somewhere between. RPS, and I can only ever speak for RPS and no other gaming site, is a business. We make money from advertising, and we get advertising because we have people reading the site. So yes, we post things on RPS in order to run our business. But how that defines what you post is always the business’s choice, and Kuchera’s frequent inference in his piece that it automatically causes nefarious or unsightly content does not speak for me. If anything, at worst his article ends up being apologist propaganda for the sites that lazily rely on crude hit chasing, as if it were the only way.

“This is the reality of the business. It takes so many page views and so many uniques to stay in business, you find yourself going after stories you know will be popular. You may pass up covering games that don’t have a large following. You may break one long story into two chunks to stretch it out. You do anything to get people to click.”

No, we don’t. It’s central to RPS’s ethos that we do no such things. RPS has always had the policy (although that’s too strong a word – it’s just a thing we did because it was what we felt like doing) to give obscure indie gaming and AAA blockbusters the same coverage. Of course a AAA game everyone’s interested in is going to do more PR, put out more trailers and pre-release teases – that likely tips the balance. But when it comes to what we review and preview, it’s about what we’re interested in, and what we hope our readers are interested in. In fact, we do far more interviews with indies than we do with big name developers, not least because they’re far easier to interview. We review more indies than triple As, because there ARE more indie games than triple As. If a game has a trailer worth posting, we post it, no matter the budget behind it. And why? Because readers ARE interested. Certainly, my review of an obscure indie platformer is going to get a fraction of the views of a review of a big-name FPS. But we want to post it, so we do. That’s partly because we have a platform from which we can promote good games. But also, fewer hits isn’t no hits, and it all adds up.

But the last statement is the most egregious. No we bloody well don’t. Were that true, RPS would absolutely be tailored to suit the stereotypically perceived gaming audience, posting endless list features and galleries of half-naked women, because the reality is, that WOULD bring in a ton of hits. It’s gross, we hate it, so we don’t do it. There are better ways.

“How do sites justify running longer, in-depth stories that won’t bring in the huge page views? I have bad news. They write shit. Popular shit.”

Of all the claims made in this piece, this is the one that’s riled me the most. Primarily because it’s so monstrously untrue in RPS’s experience. We have never, ever, set out to “write shit”. We’ve posted trailers for games that are very popular, because we know that a large portion our readers want to see those trailers, and will complain if they’re missed out. But in doing so, we’ll comment on them, mock them, criticise them, or celebrate them. They are almost never posts that get big hits, apart from peculiar exceptions where for some inexplicable reason a bunch of other sites will link to us rather than the YouTube page, or whatever. We’ll never understand that phenomenon, but we don’t expect it, nor aim for it, because it’s rare and insane. In general, such posts aren’t big deals for us, since every other site has likely posted the same, around the same time. Just without our commentary or analysis, which we hope makes it worth reading them on RPS rather than elsewhere.

But that’s not the issue with Kuchera’s claim. The issue is that for RPS, it’s the longer, in-depth stories that see the huge page views. Looking at our most popular stories, they’re the ones that are based on our own original journalism, whether they’re our having sourced interviews or information from developers that other sites haven’t got, self-sourced news stories on topical matters, particularly well written reviews of popular games, or carefully researched editorials. (There are peculiar exceptions – one of the biggest stories ever on RPS is a collection South Park RPG screenshots, that were publicly accessible to everyone. We’ll never fathom that one.) But the rule is for RPS, the in-depth, longer posts are those that bring in the larger page views. You know – the best stuff.

And this is the important point: RPS isn’t magic. RPS isn’t a fluke. There’s this perception in the industry that goes, “Yeah, but you guys are lucky.” Piss off. We are not simply lucky. We work incredibly hard, ruled by our principles, and do our best to be very good at what we do. I’m sure luck comes into it somewhere, but it’s obviously not what brings success. The site is a successful, profitable business, paying five people’s full-time wages, along with paying good rates for freelancers, without ever having compromised our values. It didn’t start off with money (although we’ve never had any debts) – we worked very hard for very little, and were very fortunate, to get here. But we’ve never needed to post a gallery of booth babes to be able to write what we otherwise want to. Not because it wouldn’t have made it easier – it would have! But because it’s gross, and we’re not willing to be gross.

RPS is a commercial site, and we’re not pretending that we’re not doing it to make money. But we’re doing it for other reasons too – our passion for gaming, our desire to communicate, and the opportunity to provide readers with entertainment, information, and discussion. We love those things. We have a platform where we can do this stuff, and we’re delighted that we’ve proven that such a platform is possible if you’re good enough at what you do, and work damned hard at it. (Which is why it’s all the more galling when it’s dismissed as an ideological fluke.) That we’ve realised we get the biggest hits when we work the hardest is, perhaps, the good side of this motivational model.

I’ve only talked about RPS here, because as I’ve said, I’m in no position to talk about anyone else’s business. But I want to be clear that this isn’t unique! There are many other sites who have not resorted to the scummiest practices of the industry, and are very successful. The suggestion that commercial success is impossible without base behaviour is a lie the industry tells itself to feel better about itself. Kuchera seems to have bought into that lie, no matter his opinion of it.

There’s one other point I want to make here, regarding Kuchera’s point on adblocking. Adblocking does suck for us, and every other site that relies on advertising. At RPS we make sure that the ads we run are the least offensive options. We NEVER have ads that obscure the content, pop up, or make noise without your permission. Sometimes – not often – they can be a little annoyingly flashy, but that’s as bad as they get. We do that because we want the site to annoy as few people as possible. Adblocking us does hurt us, and we’d obviously prefer readers didn’t do it. And on top of this, I think there’s an issue with the argument so many make, including in the PAR piece:

“Whitelist your favorite sites from your ad-blocking program, and share your favorite stories on your favorite social networks. Tweet a story you like, or share it on Facebook.”

Good stuff, except approaching it in the wrong order. Whitelist EVERY site. Set your adblock to be automatically off. When you encounter a site that then spams adverts at you, repeatedly covering the text you’re trying to read with their crap, block the hell out of it. Sites should not have to earn being unblocked – they should have to earn being blocked. This idea that you should only whitelist those that you like best is incredibly selfish. Because what about the time a Google result takes you to a site that gives you some amazingly useful information? You’re not going to bookmark it, or visit it again – you got what you needed. And they got nothing for it. That’s messed up. But I totally agree with the bit about sending money into your favourite sites : )

(It’s probably worth noting that this site carries no advertising at all, and it makes no difference to the entire universe how many clicks it receives.)

by John Walker at April 17, 2013 07:18 PM

This week the guys cover iOS7, possible watches, fingerprint technology and MS Office for iOS.

Also all the usual features such as Crapplications, Picks and a look at other mobile providers.

Show notes for iOS 020

by britishtechnetwork at April 15, 2013 09:30 PM

Heaven high. It’s episode 131 of Rum Doings, in which we don’t discuss what to do with the interest rates. And then despite Nick’s insistence before we started recording that he didn’t want to, he then insists on talking about John’s misogyny/sexism article on RPS for about forty million years. We do also discuss other more important matters, such as The Golden Girls, accidental upgrades, and My Little Pony.

We’d really love it if you left a review on iTunes. Yes, iTunes is hideous, but reviews on there are what get podcasts more attention. After 130 free episodes, we’d love you to return the favour by writing a quick review.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here:

by John Walker at April 08, 2013 04:54 PM

We are back after (another) short break to discuss the transforming iPhone 5S, the Samsung Galaxy S4 Launch event, Blackberry actually selling phones, we answer your questions in the Trouble Gusset and of course we round off the show with a round of picks!

Remember if you want your question answered in the Trouble Gusset simply email BritishTechNews@gmail.com or tweet any one of us @paulwheatley, @rodti, @streakmachine or @maniacyak

Show notes for iOS019

by britishtechnetwork at April 01, 2013 08:52 AM

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

by levine at March 16, 2013 09:59 PM

I’ve just received the most extraordinary email.

Subject: Hi, I think you’d be interested what is new! modern method for you! You are not frustrated total
Date: 15-03-2013 16:48
From: “Mike Westgarth”

Now I’m always interested in what is new and I’m no stranger to modern methods, so I can see how I might be frustrated total if I didn’t listen to what “Mike Westgarth” has to say.

Good day! I just read a cool way to be cool in bed! But do not write to anyone about this method to anyone

A cool way to be cool in bed?  The mind boggles.  It must somehow combine an edgy fashion sense with a practical and efficacious method of reducing one’s core temperature when retiring for the evening.  

Perhaps an Oriental fan with a Skrillex motif?  

An air conditioning unit that plays One Direction songs?

Ice cubes in the shape of The Fonz?

I like that “Mike Westgarth” is so enthused about this exciting modern method that he’s specifically forbidden me from writing to anyone about this method to anyone.  And there I was about to dash off a missive to my Auntie Ethel.  

You know, this principle is used sex stars!

Fuck no!  Really?  ”Mike Westgarth” now you are making a fuck of me!  Hilarity of fun!  Your talk is strange of broken!

Seriously Mike.  Stop it.

by rodti at March 15, 2013 05:03 PM

In this romantic edition of the iOS show the chaps cover the iWatch, iPhone 5S and 6 rumours. The Craplications, Picks, Tips  and we try and answer is Samsung stealing Apples cool?

by britishtechnetwork at February 18, 2013 10:29 PM

As the majority of Suede fans know all too well, Suede have only ever made three good albums: their eponymous debut, Dog Man Star, and Coming Up. Despite the evolution in themes across these albums, from squalid suburban romance, through an epic Orwellian dystopia and finally into an ether-fuelled euphoria, Brett Anderson’s songwriting maintained a consistently high quality.  Unfortunately after those three albums his creative well must truly have run dry, as demonstrated by some of the horrors lurking in 1999′s Head Music.  Some examples:

From the chorus of title track ‘Head Music’:

So give me head, give me head, give me head music instead, You know oh is it all in the mind?

To the even more risible ‘Elephant Man’:

I am, I am the elephant man It is incredible how I can look just like just like an elephant man, just like, just like my elephant fans

Jesus fucking Christ.

They managed to churn out another album so poorly received that I didn’t even bother to listen to it before the band finally imploded in 2003.  Since then Brett has kept himself occupied churning out several solo efforts, an admirable collaboration with Bernard Butler and strutting about looking like a sexy triangle, and now in 2013 Suede are back together and have been busy in the studio.

In the light of their reappearance I’d like to delve into what I think might have been a key part of their downfall, Brett’s growing dependence on fucking similes, and whether this has doomed the future of Suede forever (cue dramatic music).

Many of the challenges Suede have faced have been well documented. Infighting in the band during the recording of Dog Man Star led to Bernard’s departure, Brett got himself addicted to crack and heroin in the late 90s, and Richard Oakes has a big face.  Less well investigated is use of the simile in Suede’s body of work, and to this end I have employed science and rigour and spreadsheets and stuff.

Step 1 – Lyrics

First up we’re going to need samples of Mr Anderson’s lyrical output.  For the purposes of this study I have chosen all album tracks from Suede’s five studio albums, excluding B-sides and compilations, and the two songs released so far from their upcoming album ‘Bloodsports‘.  This makes a total of 59 songs. All lyrics have been taken from the song database at Suede Online with the exception of their two latest tracks.  A Google search turned up fairly solid looking lyrics for ‘Barriers’ here, while ‘It Starts and Ends with You’ turned out to be a trickier prospect.  I’m reasonably happy with the lyrics here with the exception of the first two lines which are clearly bollocks, and which I think should be:

Like a cause without a martyr
Like an effigy of Voltaire

It has probably not escaped your attention that the first two lines of that song are similes.

Step 2 – Word frequency analysis

By feeding the lyrics for each song into an online word frequency analysis tool I end up with lists of words, sorted by descending order of frequency.  I then grouped the word lists for each song by album.

Step 3 – Identifying similes

The simplest way to identify a simile in these lyrics is to look for occurrences of the word ‘like’, and that’s exactly what I’ve done.

Step 4 – Anderson Simile Index

This sort of exercise is much more fun if you drop in completely unnecessary and laughably flawed ways of measuring things.  In this case I’ve developed the Anderson Simile Index, or ASI. To calculate the ASI for any given Suede album, simply divide the total number of similes by the number of album tracks.  Easy!

Step 5 – Present the motherfucking findings

Findings indeed.  Let’s have a look at ‘em!

Firstly let’s look at the ASI for each of their studio albums:

Suede = 0.27 ASI
Dog Man Star = 1.08 ASI
Coming Up = 0.4 ASI
Head Music = 4.85 ASI
A New Morning = 1.45 ASI

Even this high level view shows alarming ASI levels in Head Music.  I didn’t expect the sublime Dog Man Star to peak at just over 1 ASI, although that’s still quite low.  Conversely the dreadful A New Morning emerges lower than I expected at 1.45 ASI.

Here is a visual representation in graph form of relative ASI by album:

“

But what does this hold for the future?” you bawl at me, maddened by your thirst for the sweet nectar of fact.  Let me slake that thirst now…

Bloodsports (2 songs only) =  3.5 ASI

Oh Brett, what have you done? My first impressions were that these two songs from the new album signal an interesting new direction for Suede, but the ASI paints a bleak and foreboding picture.  A picture with ravens and gravestones and zombies and that.  And spooky cobwebs.

It’s quite possible that analysing these two songs in isolation gives a skewed result, and the rest of the album is simile-free, but it’s equally possible that ‘Bloodsports’ is going to be fucking shit.  I note that the ASI is biased towards ‘It Starts and Ends with You’ rather than ‘Barriers’ by a factor of 6:1, which may or may not mean something. Let’s look a little deeper into the data, and see what it tells us.  It’s hardly surprising that four of the worst offending songs are on Head Music, and here they are with their respective simile-counts:

He's Gone - 17 similes
Elephant Man - tied 15 similes
Can't Get Enough - tied 15 similes
Electricity - 13 similes

Somewhat controversially these four songs each happen to give credit to Neil Codling as co-writer, and in fact ‘Elephant Man’ is his alone.  Could it be that Codling is the cancer that is poisoning Suede and Mr Anderson is in fact a blameless sexy triangle? Only time will tell, and I fully intend to revisit this analysis in March when ‘Bloodsports’ is released and the Anderson Simile Index has been judiciously applied.

For those of you who might want to scrutinise my workings or perform some Suede lyrical analysis of your own, the data in Microsoft Excel format is here.

 

by rodti at February 07, 2013 08:48 PM