Weary of lifting a spoon? Why not download food straight into your mouth?
I've nothing against Simon Pegg and Nick Frost but it's a bit irritating to go to the cinema and find them fronting an ad nagging you to go and see films at the cinema. 'But, but - ', I splutter, 'I am in the cinema, waiting for the film to start. Isn't it a bit perverse to encourage me to do something I am already doing, and then actively get in my way?'
They don't listen. They just go on to plug their new film, Paul, which judging from the trailer looks a bit like what might happen if two English comedians sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for Hollywood success and found that the price of this was being forced into a menage a trois with Jar Jar Binks.
I'm sure it's better than it looks though - it would have to be - and they are right, of course, when they tell you to make the effort to see films in the cinema. Culture is far too accessible these days. I mean, I'm told that you can download books now, into something called a 'Kindle'. Because books, it turns out, are just text. True, I suppose. Then again, Haribo and fillet steak are both just food, but I wouldn't necessarily want to eat them off the same plate. And at least when I pick up a book, I know that somebody somewhere (rightly or wrongly) thought this particular text was worthy of being transformed into a discrete object. In the digital age, how are you going to separate real writing from, say, an unusually elaborate e-mail? Or this shit?
On the other hand, I don't see why books and Kindles can't co-exist in peace - at least until books are seen as so ecologically unsound that people carrying them are targeted for the kind of abuse now handed out to women who wear real fur. Tree-murderer! I was reading someone's anti-Kindle rant the other day on the internet and this person sounded so smug and precious that I immediately began to warm to the pro-Kindle comments down the page - until, that is, I read one in which someone said how great it was that they were now saved from having to turn pages. What? You can't even turn a page? What are you, a baby? Is there anything else you'd like help with? Breathing, for example? They have machines that can do that for you, you know.
They don't listen. They just go on to plug their new film, Paul, which judging from the trailer looks a bit like what might happen if two English comedians sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for Hollywood success and found that the price of this was being forced into a menage a trois with Jar Jar Binks.
I'm sure it's better than it looks though - it would have to be - and they are right, of course, when they tell you to make the effort to see films in the cinema. Culture is far too accessible these days. I mean, I'm told that you can download books now, into something called a 'Kindle'. Because books, it turns out, are just text. True, I suppose. Then again, Haribo and fillet steak are both just food, but I wouldn't necessarily want to eat them off the same plate. And at least when I pick up a book, I know that somebody somewhere (rightly or wrongly) thought this particular text was worthy of being transformed into a discrete object. In the digital age, how are you going to separate real writing from, say, an unusually elaborate e-mail? Or this shit?
On the other hand, I don't see why books and Kindles can't co-exist in peace - at least until books are seen as so ecologically unsound that people carrying them are targeted for the kind of abuse now handed out to women who wear real fur. Tree-murderer! I was reading someone's anti-Kindle rant the other day on the internet and this person sounded so smug and precious that I immediately began to warm to the pro-Kindle comments down the page - until, that is, I read one in which someone said how great it was that they were now saved from having to turn pages. What? You can't even turn a page? What are you, a baby? Is there anything else you'd like help with? Breathing, for example? They have machines that can do that for you, you know.
posted by martin at 10:57 AM
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