Truth to power, with dick jokes

I've been watching The Daily Show, on and off, since about 2004.

I'd like to follow it through official channels, but as much as I love Jon Stewart's work I don't think I could justify upgrading our entire TV package to get the Comedy Central sub-channel that airs it in the UK. Can't watch it on the US website either, and the UK site doesn't have entire episodes.

The show was at its peak in the Bush years, with Stephen Colbert's frankly astonishing testicular fortitude when facing interview subjects¹. I'm not entirely sure when I stopped watching regularly, but it's only in the last year or so - mostly due to the John Oliver co-hosted Bugle podcast - that I've started putting in the effort to keep on top of it.

I've mentioned before that I find anger amusing, but the kind of directed frustration in the best Daily Show pieces is different. When I lose my temper at something, I wish I had half the righteous fury and elegant expression that Stewart gets to deploy.

That same anger - part rage, part disbelief, part disappointment - is the driving force of all my favourite satire; The Onion's 6 Best Dresses At The Golden Globes is so close to the bone that it couldn't have been anything but the product of frustration with the world.

It's debatable how much of an impact something like satire has in the real world, though; in the UK, Have I Got News For You is probably more noted by politicians than The Daily Show is likely to be in America, mostly by virtue of how many politicians appear on it, but there are regular polls that trumpet the importance of Jon Stewart's output on the way young people in the US get their news. Stewart himself is more trusted as a news source than a lot of "real" new anchors.

It's kind of a shame that a lot of it gets dismissed - even by Stewart himself - as "just comedy", as if telling a joke about something automatically means it's not important any more. The best comedy lowers your defences with a laugh just enough to let the truth get in.

¹ I've never been as big a fan of Colbert's spin-off show; I don't think his character works as well in a longer form. But his speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner - a hilarious condemnation of George W. Bush's policies delivered fewer than twenty feet from the man himself - is probably the best example of his style.

Rant on Rails

This isn't going to be particularly interesting, or make a whole lot of sense, to a lot of people. Probably best to just ignore it.

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been two major vulnerabilities identified in the parameter-parsing in Ruby on Rails - first in the YAML, then in the JSON bit. I don't really understand the ins and outs of it myself, but essentially it allows a malicious user to run unapproved code by forcing the Rails app to read input as if it was an object created in the application. This has knock-on risks for the database, which obviously isn't ideal.

Upgrading recent Rails apps is pretty straightforward; you just update your Gemfile to point to the new Rails gem, then bundle install and deploy your app.

One of our sites, however, runs an ancient version of Rails on an ancient version of Ruby - so old that I can't actually get it working right on my own PC at work. And that's without even trying to update Rails.

Long story short, I spent pretty much all of today trying to get things working on my own machine, and didn't get anywhere. I attempted to use a simpler solution to the problem on the live server, but that went horribly wrong and I had to roll it back pretty quickly.

I'm still not sure how I'm going to get this problem sorted. I don't think my preferred solution is going to be acceptable given the number of our customers who would flip out if this particular offering was to disappear - but it's getting so very, very tempting.

Assassin's Creed ZZZ

I'm pretty sure I hate Assassin's Creed III.

The process for even getting into the thing - insert disc, would you like to update?, downloading update, installing update, installing game, would you like to pay for an online pass?, please sign into/up for uPlay, all before the main title screen - was a pretty tedious affair, but I'm tempted to say that the game itself is surpassing even that snoozefest so far.

It's just tutorial after tutorial, with all-too-regular loading screens and badly-designed cutscenes. I'm pretty sure every cinematic so far has had at least one shot where a speaking character's face has been partially or entirely obscured by a low-poly wine bottle in the foreground.

And that's once I've made it into the Animus; all this Desmond nonsense at the start is skating on the very thin-ice notion that anybody actually gives a shit about the ridiculous scifi conspiracy/apocalypse story supposedly underpinning the narrative. I'm not here for the story, goddamn it, just f--king let me stab guys.

Oh what's that? I've got to play through the entire 16th-century voyage to America? F--k you, Assassin's Creed III.

Even when I have gotten to actually play a bit of murder, the game seems so determined to hold my hand the entire way through that my slightest deviation from its exact instructions has caused me to repeat a couple of sections several times. Maybe my memory's wrong, but I don't recall being spotted by guards having such a disasterous insta-fail outcome in the original game (my favourite) or Assassin's Creed II (objectively the best).

I'm going to force myself to get to the Conor stuff. I'm hoping the world opens up a bit once you get to the guy on the box, but I have a bad feeling it's not going to be any different.

Just give me a target and an environment. That's all I've ever wanted from Assassin's Creed, but the series has become so obsessed with micromanaging your progress that every two minutes you're interrupted with a checkpoint or cutscene or loading screen and you're rarely trusted to do things by yourself. Except hunting for flags, feathers or Benjamin Franklin's almanac pages.

So long as it's not important, knock yourself out. But don't get any bright ideas about how you're going to approach the actual game. Ubisoft has a script, you know.

Practical makes perfect

A couple of nights ago, The Matrix was on TV again. And I had to watch it all, again. It'd be rude not to, when it's there. I've already written about The Matrix here, but long story short: it's really good¹.

Tonight, Aliens was on. And I would've watched it all too, if we didn't have to go to the gym in the morning.

I could go into detail about how much I like Aliens (quite a lot, but less than Alien), but the thing that really struck me was how brilliant the special effects work looked, even in HD, 27 years after it came out. Especially compared to The Matrix, which was at the pinnacle of effects work at the time but looks frankly atrocious when they have to use CGI for exteriors.

Computer effects have come a long way even in the last few years though, and in some films it's difficult to tell whether something's a physical or CGI effect - it's actually surprising how many of the shots of GERTY in Moon are computer-generated. But that's on a closed, controlled set; once you get natural lighting involved things get very difficult. Even Gollum from Lord of the Rings - still probably the most realistic computer-generated character ever - is starting to look a little rough around the edges in HD.

Model shots are timeless. They'll always look good. Not just in big-budget films like Aliens, either - the effects in early series' of Red Dwarf look brilliant, and that's on a TV budget. They certainly look better, years down the line, than the newer series' computer effects².

I'm not sure why CGI ended up taking over so completely - surely it can't be that much cheaper to override the fact that models just look so much better?Movie budgets are getting bigger and bigger, and although there are some things that would be difficult with primarily practical effects, I'd love to see a resurgence in doing things "for real", even if it is only at 1:35 scale.

¹ Watching it with someone else - my wife, in this instance - changes the experience somewhat; suddenly all the little things you can forgive watching it alone become hilarious, unavoidable embarrassments. Tank's entire performance, for example.

² Which is probably why they went back to practical model shots for Red Dwarf X.

True North

When I was growing up, I didn't have much interest in music. I remember wanting to play guitar, but I can't remember liking any specific bands or musicians. It wasn't until I was nearly out of secondary school (so, around 16 or 17) that I started listening to stuff for the sake of it, rather than just what happened to be playing on the radio.

The first band I ever got into properly was Bad Religion. This was entirely thanks to their presence in Crazy Taxi, which I played to death on the Dreamcast. I was already aware of The Offspring, whose songs made up the other half of the soundtrack; I found a copy of a Bad Religion compilation album, All Ages, in the only music shop in my home town.

I can't remember what order I bought their "proper" albums in, but I know it wasn't chonologically accurate. I'm pretty sure I had all if not most of the Atlantic (aka, "sell-out") releases before I got a hold of any of the earlier Epitaph stuff (I remember starting with The Grey Race and Stranger than Fiction, which had all the Crazy Taxi tracks on them); it took me forever to find Against The Grain and I ended up getting a copy from one of my university friends (from Nevada) whose dad owned a record store.

Actually, that means I bought Bad Religion's entire discography (at that time, 12 years' worth of releases, from 1988's Suffer through to The New America, one of two discs I don't still have) in a little over two years. It suddenly strikes me as an awfully quick progression from "never heard of these guys" to "omg buy all the cds". While I was still at university I even went to Dublin to see them play, which I'm pretty sure I ever went to a gig where I wasn't at school with anybody in the band¹.

It turned out I was just in time for their return to Epitaph, the indie label the band had started in 1980 to sell their own stuff which meant a whole bunch of new albums in the intervening years. It's a bit like marathoning a TV show to catch up to a new season, though - I had a whole lot of new (to me) stuff to get through very quickly, then suddenly it was years between albums.

I'm still not sure what hooked me on Bad Religion in particular. I liked some Offspring stuff but wouldn't have considered myself a fan, and most of the other punk stuff I've tried since² hasn't really stuck. I'd like to think it's the balance of social conscience in the band's politics; unlike some bands, they're never preachy and often don't have answers to the problems they're frustrated by. The general perspective is probably best expressed by the song Do What You Want - I have enough of my own shit to deal with, so you do whatever you like so long as you don't wreck up my efforts at self-fulfillment.

The exact order of my favourite Bad Religion albums varies, but my top three (at the time of writing) are No Control (1989), The Grey Race (1996) and The Empire Strikes First (2004). I'm still not familiar enough with their latest album as it only came out last Monday, but it's a very energetic and angry punk album coming from a band that's been going for 34 years.

¹ Like I said, I wasn't really into music before this point; the idea of travelling any distance to listen to music I already had on CD was weird until I was a proper fan of something. I've now seen Bad Religion play three times live: twice in Dublin and once in London.

² I've got a couple of Offspring albums (mixed), three or maybe four Pennywise discs (very good, accessible) and have also tried Propagandhi and Anti-Flag (too preachy), The Bouncing Souls and The Vandals (a bit jokey) and NOFX (made zero impression).

Not today

Today has been too much effort. Spent a more of it than I'd have liked trying to figure out how to get information I don't have (but really kind of should) out of the database at work, and I'm pretty sure it's my fault so I can't even blame the last guy. Oh don't get me wrong: I'll do my best to pass it off as his fault. I just don't think it'll stick this time.

Then I had to get the bus home. Fairly certain that the driver of the first #17 I approached saw me, but decided to drive off anyway when I got within six feet of the door. Public transport is not condusive to a calm, rational mentality at the best of times; when it's my only choice thanks to the bad weather, the slightest mistake or oversight takes on the guise of a concerted, malicious act directed squarely at me.

From the New World

I've had a rocky relationship with Shin Sekai Yori. A lot of the early episodes felt meandering, but usually had an intriguing scene or revelation at the end to tempt me into the next one. It didn't seem to be going anywhere, and then there was a multi-episode arc that felt like filler, or at least a distraction from the massive unaddressed surprise in the preceeding installment.

There are some really interesting ideas in the series, not to mention utterly arresting mythology and terminology - naughty children being erased from existence by "Trickster Cats", for instance - introduced in the very first episode, but to begin with it feels like a lot of worldbuilding that's quickly forgotten about in favour of a storyline focusing on something entirely different.

It's only in the last few episodes that things have started to come together, with plot threads, minor character moments and even that apparently pointless arc all suddenly being massively important not so much to the plot, but certainly to the characters and what the show seems to be trying to say.

The second most recent episode in particular had a fairly accusatory tone, pointed squarely at two of the main characters' naivety and apparent recklessness. This in addition to questions about the nature of young democracies versus the preceeding structure or other competing societal models. The show also generally seems to be warning of the unforseeable and major consequences that come about following what seem like harmless lies or rash decisions - sometimes taking years after the fact to become apparent. There've also been a few moments about racism and imperialism into the bargain, and I've not even touched on the unusual sexual politics of the society the show is set in.

There's no doubt it's a much more complicated - and adult - story than the early, seemingly confused episodes had me believing; it's a bit of a pity it takes so long to get to the point, but at the same time rushing into such heavy moral quandries could have been even more off-putting.

I can see more than a little bit of Lain in the philosophy and even the art style, but really I can't think of anything quite as multifaceted as Shin Sekai Yori; if you've got the time to watch the fourteen episodes released so far, I highly recommend it. I would urge you to watch them in quick succession too, otherwise the slow pace might put you off altogether.

Internet slang: Another way the world makes me feel old

I've not been with the internet since it began, by any measure - I'm pretty sure we never had a modem slow enough to be measured in "bauds", for instance. I have been participating online for the majority of my conscious life though, mostly on forums but occasionally IRC channels too (not hacker ones; I've never had much of an interest in the misuse of computers).

I don't remember there being quite so much slang thrown around as easily or as widely as it is now, though. There was always a "lol" here and there (I made a conscious decision to stop using that particular acronym not long after I first encountered it), maybe a rofl or lmao, but there's a bewildering number of shorthand phrases around nowadays.

Okay, that paragraph made me sound (and feel) ridiculously old.

I'm a bit of a sticker for grammar, but for some reason the acronym shorthand common online isn't half as annoying as txt spk abbreviation or l337 5p34k letter substitution. I suppose it's because an acronym preserves the meaning and order of words, and although they've been cut down to a single letter each I don't have as hard a time deciphering it¹.

There's usually enough context in the words or familiar acronyms around jfc for me to figure out wtf it means, but it feels like a barrier designed to keep my fogey brain out of these youngsters' internet. Or maybe I'm just getting paranoid.

¹ The trick, I've found, is to work out one of the words from the context and work from there. Also, and "f" is usually pretty obviously profane.

BTOOOM!

Unopposed recipient of the "Dumbest Title I've Ever Seen" award, and with one of the least likeable casts I can remember, BTOOOM! essentially boils down to "Battle Royale with a videogame tacked on". A group of random strangers are sent to a deserted island, given bombs and told to kill enough of their fellow hostages to earn their escape. No indication if multiple "winners" can emerge in a game, or how often players are refilled to replace dead or victorious players.

The game being played for real on the island is based on the hugely popular (in the story) online shooter BTOOOM! (hence the name of the show) and is being inexplicably run by the same company as published the computer game version, overseen by its lead designer, and livestreamed to a shadowy cabal of unidentified silhouettes.

A central part of the story is that everyone on the island was nominated by someone they knew in their "normal" lives. While there are (literally) a couple of ordinary, likeable people who've been dragged into the game, the majority of them are brutish thugs or sociopaths who would almost certainly have happily killed others in their everyday existence anyway. Plus the handful who were were actually remorseless murderers to begin with.

The bombs - referred to as BIMs (the acronym's never explained), come in several varieties, and every episode seems to introduce a new type. As of episode 9, there have been timed grenades, proximity mines, impact explosives, remotely-detonated traps, sound-activated bombs, smoke grenades and gas bombs.

The cast is constantly shifting as players die or escape from encounters, but nobody in the show is worth rooting for. The main character - hikkikomori online shooter nerd Sakamoto, who has conveniently high social skills for a shut-in - has a self-righteous streak a mile wide which comes primarily from his experience in the online game. This also means he's a strategic genius, with a Jack Bauer-esque knack for escaping hopeless situations.

The female lead Himiko - coincidentally Sakamoto's online wife from the BTOOOM! MMO - is a terrible mix bad stereotypes, swinging from terrified schoolgirl to man-hating killer to damsel in distress from episode to episode. I have a feeling a lot of my disappointment with her character "arc" so far is that she bears more than a passing resemblance to Marlene from Blue Gender¹ but Himiko lacks the interesting traits and personality.

I don't know why I'm still watching this garbage. It's caught up with the manga so there's no end to the story in sight, and I'm highly doubtful that this setup is going to be interesting for much longer.

I blame Crunchyroll. It's almost as easy to keep watching this rubbish as it is to find a new, better, show.

¹ Marlene is one of my favourite characters of all time. I really need to rewatch Blue Gender at some point; I don't think I've seen it through since it aired on SciFi back in the day.

I am a jerk

The other morning, BBC Breakfast ran a piece about gamers that apparently got some complaints. I didn't see it, but I can imagine I'd have been shouting a the TV if I had. This is not unusual when I'm watching BBC Breakfast generally, so it's not a stretch to imagine.

Today, they ran a piece about elderly gamers, which you can still see on the BBC News website.

I missed the start of the article (I came in about 20 seconds into the video linked above). I saw an 85-year-old lady talking about videogames and rolled my eyes, chuckling inwardly about how much Wii she must play, or other casual games.

Then the camera panned over a stack of PS3 games, before showing her playing Disgaea 4, which is fairly high on my list of "hardcore games I can't get into". On a 65" high-def TV.

This octogenerian is a better gamer than I am¹.

There's been a lot of coverage lately about gaming as a cliquey, hostile "boy's club", and there's plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and probably scientific, to support the assertion. The self-identifying hardcore nucleus of "gamers" is predominantly male, unreasonably aggressive, and visciously territorial. Every conversation about a game with a suspected Outsider is a chance to boost your own ego by belittling or downplaying the Other's achievements.

I had thought of myself as being better than that. I see myself as open-minded and fair, as someone who'll make a rational judgement rather than a knee-jerk reaction based on preconception. Maybe most people do.

But when I think about my automatic dismissal of Hilda just because she didn't meet my expectation of what a "real" gamer is, it's kind of an asshole thing to do.

¹ Turns out she's been playing games for 40 years, which is longer than I've been alive.

Hanasaku Iroha

Normally I'd wait until I'd seen more than a handful of episodes of a series before trying to write about it, but Hanasaku Iroha is an odd one. I can't figure out for the life of me who it's supposed to be for.

It's not what I'd expect from a shoujo series, because there's no romance subplot (yet, anyway) for the main character; there was an unrequited romantic confession in the first episode, right before the heroine moves away from Tokyo to live at her grandmother's bathhouse. But there's no male lead, so it's avoided the kind of harem nonsense you normally see when someone moves away from Tokyo to live at their grandmother's bathhouse.

It's also got next to no fanservice, but that just makes it all the more jarring when it does happen. It's not as uncomfortable as, say, Ikki Tousen, but when the show goes from a light-hearted-but-serious character focus in one episode to implied bondage, erotic fiction or risqué cosplay in the next, it does make you wonder who they're trying to appeal to.

Maybe the director's trying to have his cake and eat it by combining a decent slice-of-life story with this level of fanservice, but it's so totally out of place that it kind of ruins all the good faith built up by the interesting characters and decent story.

It's not enough to discourage me from watching the series, but I'd prefer not to have the good stuff interrupted by transparent attempts to pander to the "typical" male audience.

An Enemy of Fate

I think The Walking Dead has broken me. Until the final episode of Telltale's deservedly acclaimed adventure games, I don't ever remember being emotionally affected by a film, TV show or game¹. The Walking Dead is definitely the first story in a long time that caused me to tear up.

A few minutes ago, we watched the last episode - ever - of Fringe.

I didn't get along with Fringe to begin with. The first season, in particular, relied a bit too heavily on "monster of the week"-type cases, and the frequency with which the weekly disaster happened to be exactly the same as something Dr. Walter Bishop had done in the 1960s bugged me right from the start.

But I kept watching for one reason: the relationship between Walter and his son Peter was such a joy to watch. Their (re)introduction in the first episode, when Peter is coralled into signing his father out of a mental institution, was a bit convenient - and Peter's initial reluctance to get involved with his dad's rehabilitation disappeared a bit too quickly. But as the core of the show, their interactions were fascinating.

Subsequent seasons moved towards conspiracy and evil scientist territory, with an approaching war between two parallel universes providing most of the tension and explanations. The central focus of the show remained on the Bishop family though, and low-budget special effects or convenient plot threads couldn't diminish Fringe's heart.

The fifth and final season was only thirteen episodes long; the way events unfold make it obvious that the writers had much grander plans for their characters than ratings would ultimately allow. Some of the story arcs end abruptly and there are a couple of obstacles that feel forced and artificial; likewise other goals are accomplished too quickly or easily.

But the emotional journey of the characters, especially Peter and Walter Bishop, always feels genuine and earned. John Noble's performance throughout Fringe is much better than the sub-X-Files first season ever deserved. He and Joshua Jackson managed to elevate the show's most important relationship into something worth sticking around for, whatever other hiccups the story or viewing figures might have thrown at it.

Their scenes together in this last series have always made me feel so sad, as they try to save the world and each other, while struggling to cope with the disasters that have affected both their literal and figurative worlds.

I'm going to miss Fringe, and especially John Noble's Walter. But I'm glad they had a chance to wrap up the story and give the characters the finality they deserved.

¹ Well, maybe the "Married Life" segment at the start of Up.

Django Unchained

This post was actually written on the 19th, but I've dated it for the 18th for the sake of pretences that I was able to write something every day. We did see Django Unchained on the 18th, and if it'd been a shorter movie I'd have written and posted it that night.

This is going to be a semi-random collection of thoughts and reflections; having only seen the film once there's undoubtedly plenty I've missed. I might jump around a bit, and no doubt some of these thoughts will be only half-finished.

At 3 hours, Django Unchained is not a short movie. But it's deceptively quick; it doesn't feel like a long film, and in fact could easily have got away with a few more scenes in the early part of the story.

I don't want to go into the story in any detail because spoilers, but also because other people have already said a lot more than I could in a much better way than I could about the legacy of slavery in America and how Tarantino has challenged the rather lazy assumptions people have made, in recent decades, about the lives of slaves. In short, it's not just "working without being paid"; the violence, inhumane treatment and abuse of black slaves by white plantation owners is much worse than my white middle-class upbringing ever gave me reason to consider. I always assumed white liberal guilt was about making people feel bad about racism, but in my case it's my ignorance and indifference that's making me guilty. Surely the treatment of slaves on the plantations of the American South isn't any worse than the treatment of slaves in Britain at the same time; I've taken a lot for granted, and it's always a bit of a shock to be reminded just how much.

I've long accepted that years of consuming violent media and video games have desensitised me to violence, but Django Unchained challenged that assumption. There are two types of violence in Django. The operatic, cartoony Tarantino violence, with literal geysers of blood and cannonfire sound effects used for bullets. And there's the real violence. The cartoony stuff I can take, but the real is horrific.

The best examples of this difference are from early in the film; Christoph Waltz shoots a slave trader, and his head explodes in a fountain of red. It's actually kind of funny, and most of the violence at the start of the film - and in fact all of the deaths of white people - are treated with at best indifference and at worst glee¹. White people die in either boring or hilarious ways. Then there's the introduction of Leonardo di Caprio's character, which features a protracted and uncomfortably visceral "mandingo" fight - two black slaves forced to fight to the death. The audio for the entire scene has the grunts, howls and screams of the fighters underneath it, so even when you don't see them you know what's happening. There are no fancy special effects or quick cuts. It's horrific, and it wants you to face the horror with the knowledge that, not so long ago, it was actually happening.

I can't remember the last time a fight in a film was presented as anything other than a macho, ultimately good battle between good and evil. Watching two powerless men trying to kill each other for the enjoyment of bored farmers is so far from that usual fantasy.

There's a lot of humour in the film, and the performances are universally brilliant (although when Tarantino makes his cameo appearance it did briefly pull me out of the moment). Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz are very goof, but I've not seen either of them in enough to have had expectations going in. The standout performances, for me, are diCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson, whose master/servant relationship has layers and nuance going back years. It's difficult to tell how much of their interactions is for show - for each other as well as any onlookers - and the apparent equality between them is in marked contrast with both the usual slave/owner relationship and the genuine equality between Django and Dr. Shultz.

TL;DR version: Go see Django Unchained. It's funny, violent and uncomfortably serious, and manages to pull them all off equally brilliantly. Probably Tarantino's best film, and something people are going to remember and talk about for years.

¹ "Best" and "worst" in this case are not the ideal words; I don't think it's a bad thing that Tarantino chooses to gloss over their deaths. It's not a film about white people, and in every case they're very clearly people who deserve every bit of what happens to them.

Graffiti

I've got a weird appreciation for graffiti. I don't mean "street art" - though I do recognise the skill and speed requried - or "tagging", which is just untidy. At least when a dog marks his territory I don't have to look at the messy result for weeks afterwards. I mean the random, angry accusations and (in my experience, usually sectarian) vitriol you get on bus shelters and school desks.

The undirected aggression and violent allegations that can only be expressed anonymously, in biro, on a wall for strangers to see, like a caveman form of the internet.

I find anger hilarious. Apoplectic rage caused by a situation you could have avoided but directed at someone (or something) that can't change anything now. Which is odd, considering how impatient I can get myself.

Misspelled invective, obscure and improbable accusations about everything from my parentage and political affiliation to baseless assumptions about my sexual preferences and physical appearance. If nothing else, the creativity on show is impressive, even if the penmanship or artistic ability of the creator is disasterous.

My favourite piece of graffiti however, which I unfortunately saw before I carried a permanently-connected internet-enabled communications device with built-in camera and GPS locator¹, was on a bus stop in Belfast. Scrawled in smallish permanent marker block capitals was the immortal (for me) phrase "Higgins is a fool".

I have no idea who this Higgins was, or why he was foolish, but there's something about the lack of offence in the phrase that really sticks with me. Compared to the usual caliber of sectarian profanity you get on bus shelters on the Ormeau Road, the inoffensiveness of that sentence really stood out for me.

But my wife has seen something even better - years ago in England, someone apparently felt so strongly about the issue that they had to deface a wall to spread the important message, "I love my dog".

¹ It's amazing how quickly we not only take this incredible borderline magic - which would have been unimaginable in my own lifetime - for granted, but we get frustrated and angry when we're only able to get a 2G signal.

The comic at the top of this post is by Phil Selby of The Rut, and mostly inspired this post when I found a copy of it in my Dropbox.

Sherlock's Holmes vs Elementary's Sherlock

This might be a shocking admission, but I haven't read any of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Well, I have a vague memory of reading one - something about copying an encyclopaedia - when I was maybe twelve, but it's obviously not stuck with me.

As a result, my only real exposure to the Sherlock Holmes character is through the Guy Ritchie films, the Steven Moffatt TV series and the US drama - in that order¹. I liked them all in different ways, but I'm not going to bother with the blockbusters in this post as A. I've only seen them once each, and B. their setting - in the original Victorian time period - means comparisons are kind of difficult with the two set in this millennium.

A lot of people I saw posting about it online seemed horrified by the idea of Lucy Liu playing Watson. In a Sherlock Holmes series set in New York, at that. But I think Elementary's not only a solid show, in a lot of ways I think it's a better show than the Moffatt adaptation.

Pitchforks at the ready.

To begin with, I was comparing Elementary unfavourably to the BBC show, but having rewatched Sherlock recently I found the comparisons coming down on the opposite side of the fence than I'd expected.

This is where my lack of Arthur Conan Doyle experience comes in: I don't know which of the Sherlocks is closer to the original character as described. But on the plus side, that means I don't care. I'm not hung up on authenticity, so I get to just enjoy what I'm watching.

For the sake of clarity (and conciseness), I'm going to refer to the respective Sherlocks (and Watsons) by their actors' names, rather than saying "Sherlock's Holmes" and "Elementary's Sherlock" all the time.

I definitely prefer Johnny Lee Miller's nervous energy, his disappointment with others when they don't see what he does, and his excitement and eagerness when he gets to explain it. Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock is dismissive and doesn't seem to realise that what he has is special. He looks down on people, they just don't get it because they're stupid - he's not doing anything special. Everybody else is just substandard.

There's no doubt that Cumberbatch is a fascinating character to watch, and his deductions are allowed to be more complex because of the in-picture overlays showing his thoughts or mobile phone screen. But he's totally alien to the viewer, which seems odd because I always got the impression that we're supposed to identify with Sherlock as viewers more than we are Watson.

I also feel that Miller's emotional moments - when he gets them - are more believable. His Sherlock is not as consistent and cold a manipulator of other people as Cumberbatch, which tends to make me doubt his version's honesty. Is he actually vulnerable, or just screwing with someone as an experiment?

But while I might prefer Sherlock in Elementary, the Moffatt show is probably better. The cases and puzzles aren't as predictable in Sherlock; while the US procedural format makes it fairly easy to predict whodunnit quite early, the reluctance of Cumberbatch's Sherlock to share what he's noted as quickly as Miller's version does means you're more often in Watson's position - seeing, but not observing - than the US version. Elementary seems to want its audience to identify with (and in some cases, out-deduce) Sherlock.

By bringing the audience closer to Sherlock, it also makes it easier to understand why Lucy Liu's Watson becomes attached to her Sherlock than the frankly baffling notion that Martin Freeman would put up with the constant abuse, lawbreaking and condescention of his - and Cumberbatch doesn't even have the exuse that he's a "proper" drug addict like Miller. It's worth remembering, though, that Elementary also has the advantage of a much longer season than Sherlock, which allows it to show more of the personal time between cases.

Of course Elementary isn't without its flaws; like most US crime dramas it's very formulaic and predictable as a result; it also seemed to take a few episodes before they decided what kind of a person they wanted Sherlock to be. Not to mention what his relationship was going to be with Lucy Liu's Watson; there are a few early scenes hinting none too subtly at a potential romantic encounter further down the line, which - thankfully - seems to have been forgotten about. Nevermind the assault to canon, it's nice to see that the writers don't feel the urge to make the female lead fall for the damaged, brilliant male lead. They don't have the hugely entertaining verbal sparring of Moffat's version though; Elementary certainly isn't as witty or clever as Sherlock.

For a lot of Elementary's time so far, I found myself trying not to think of it as a Sherlock Holmes story, primarily to avoid the inevitable (I thought) negative comparison to the Moffatt series. But I think I might actually prefer Elementary - if not as a Holmes adaptation, certainly as entertainment.

It's also got a much better theme tune than it really has any right to.

¹ I'm not sure if I should have included Basil the Great Mouse Detective, Without a Clue or Young Sherlock Holmes in this list. Fairly sure they're all non-canonical.