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Park in it, man. How old is that joke? It has probably existed since the fifties. Space culture and science fiction have been influencing us for such a long time that it’s hard to conceive of life without the promise of the future. In recent years it has seemed to fade into the distance a bit, but has it faded, or have we just forgotten how futuristic our lives actually are?

Lots of people ask the question, “If this is the future then where is my jet pack?”. But while flying cars and jet packs are all very well in theory, they aren’t really terribly practical. Even if the technology worked perfectly, people never seem to consider the practical concerns. What would you think when, having bought a quiet place in the country – away from any busy roads, you suddenly realise that your house is, as the crow and now every other bugger flies, the quickest way from A to B. So do we build lanes up in the air? Why is this better than what we have now? At least if your car breaks down mid-journey you don’t drop to the ground like a stone. If you are at this point thinking, “Hello, I said jet pack not flying car!”, then you are only allowed to hold this argument if you regularly ride a motorbike.

Consider auto-focus on cameras. This was, at one point, considered one of the most complicated things to achieve – now it is ubiquitous. Handwriting recognition is pretty much there now, just late enough for most people to have realised that handwriting was never such a good system in the first place. Speech is pretty close now as well. I am writing this article by tapping my fingers on a solid piece of glass. If that’s not from the future, then I don’t know what is. How long ago did Graham Bell say that he could outlandishly predict that one day every town would have a telephone? How many telephones are there on this train with me?

When we looked at the future in the 1950s we predicted: auto-focus, handwriting recognition, speech synthesis and recognition, artificial intelligence and we imagined they would be in machines that would do our dishes for us and vacuum for us. We have dishwashers now, we have little machines that will do the hoovering for us, will mow our lawn for us. People don’t like to call them robots just as they don’t consider artificial intelligence to be working in their camera when it artificially decides what it thinks you want to focus on.*

Next year IBM are going to complete the next of their big projects. These big projects were made famous with “Deep Blue” the computer that beat Gary Kasparov at chess. The current project will pit a computer against humans playing Jeopardy (the US game show). It will answer questions that involve understanding categories of things, word play and puns and will do it faster than the best players of the game – if it works. An amazing step when it happens. Of course when the same technology is in your computer a few years later it becomes known as just another computer program.

We don’t notice the things that are happening by degrees. We look back and see times like the 1850s when so much seemed to happen in just a few short years and marvel. How could we go from the invention of these devices to their widespread adoption in such a short space of time? We assume that people living in the 1850s must have been amazed, but I have a different view. Mobile telephones are only around 30 years old and their adoption is far wider than technologies like the train and the car (in the first 30 years). And yet we are all pretty blasé about our mobile phones. I once heard somebody using a mobile phone on an aeroplane that was flying in the sky above America. They were calling Europe and complaining about the poor reception. We come so far and yet what is brilliant about us humans, and endearingly frustrating about us too, is that we are never really satisfied. This is why anyone who thinks we will ever arrive in the future is wrong. We’ll always long for the next version, next time it’s going to be awesome.

Open the iPod bay doors HAL.

*For those reading who think that it is less artificial intelligence and more artificial sight there is a difference. Making a device like the eye that can be set to focus based on instructions from a brain is like a manual focus camera. It is the brain that says, I want to focus on this bit. Cameras use all sorts of tricks (the artificial intelligence) to determine which bit of the image in front of it is foreground and background and then which of the several bits of foreground is most likely to be the one you want to focus on.

I have some strange dreams, most people seem to. Except when I talk to people about them, my dreams seem to be at least a bit different. Mine are often complete stories, I mean sometimes I have ethereal dreams like this:

I go to bed, Katherine is to follow me up. Pete and her are downstairs watching tv. I fall asleep upstairs, Katherine falls asleep before making it up to bed. I’m woken by a knock at the door. It’s Pete carrying a still sleeping Katherine. He says, “she was talking in her sleep. I wrote down what she said, in case it was important, on her face”. And sure enough very delicately written on her face were several notes that I couldn’t make out.

That dream doesn’t really seem to have a point, which makes it like most dreams that people describe to me. But that’s a kind of rare dream for me. I normally dream in something approaching full stories or movie pitch ideas. For example the other night I dreamt this:

Emma Thomson is a giantess, she is around 12 foot tall. She is otherwise a normal person, this isn’t science fiction. Being so tall has taken its toll on her physically, society has taken its toll on her emotionally. She’s so self-conscious, the only time she goes outside is for her physiotherapy sessions. She spends time at home, online, where she falls in love with a man on the internet who now wants to meet her. She is worried, and is scared to let him see her. Meanwhile at her physiotherapy office, her doctor is retiring and is going to be replaced by Jim Carey. Emma isn’t sure but she thinks Jim actually likes her. When he asks her on a date she freaks out and has a panic attack but eventually allows him to take her out. When home she feels guilty – has she betrayed the internet guy?

But Emma knows that when she was alone she reached out to meet John on the internet. She needed something. And he provided it, and he had been very sweet tonight. She hardly knew Jim really, but there was something magical about him. Something so exciting. Maybe she needed somebody who would take her outside, somebody like Jim, that would take her out of her shell. But really… Really… It has to be one thing at a time. John was exciting enough a development in Emma’s life. She turns to her computer and finds that he’s still up. He’s staying in a local hotel. She asks him to meet her in the bar. And despite herself she goes.

So yes. My dreams are a bit weird. I mean that would be a pretty bizarre movie as so much of it would be happening off screen in Emma’s head and on the internet. But that’s the way I dream pretty much. Most nights. Complete stories just like that. As Katherine often says about one of my terrible puns, at least I amuse myself.

Once, while having my ticket inspected on a train, the guard looked at the book I was reading and said, “Oh, you’re reading that. My brother read that once – hated it”.

The book in question was “How to read a film” by James Monaco, a book which talks about not just what makes up the shot you are looking at, but also where it’s come from, how they did it, and most importantly what they were thinking when they did it. I don’t mean, “what they were thinking” like this – “ooh, after we get Cleese and Cruise to climb this cliff, I’m definately going to eat that cheese sandwich I saw on the craft cart. I hope Cruz hasn’t snaffled it.” No, not thoughts like that, although I would certainly read a book like that [Note to self: write book like that.]

No. Instead it’s things that you don’t notice in films until they go wrong. Watch a bad movie, a movie that just somehow nebulously feels bad. Why is it bad? Part of it is bad writing, part of it is bad acting, bad music, bad lighting. But often if you can’t put your finger on it – it’s bad direction. Directors don’t just tell actors their motivation and tell somebody to point a camera in their general direction – they frame the movie for you. And there is a language to it.

Think of a novel, sometimes you can hear the author’s voice really loudly, they might have a distinctive style of their own. Sometimes the author gets the hell out of the way, something that’s really hard to do but very effective. Sometimes you can hear the gears grinding as they struggle to…

…find…

…pace.

The same thing happens with direction. It’s the combination of the director of photography’s choices, the editors choices, and the director giving them enough options to work with. There’s a language that’s been built up. Two characters (mid two person shot, waist up, push camera towards), one speaks (cut to close up face, push towards) “We can do this.”, other responds (same shot on the other), “It’s a deal.” (slam cut to hands shaking, slam cut to legs walking away, slam cut to long shot with the two full body). You’ve seen it so many times before. It’s surprising now when you don’t see it. It’s the language. Or it is? They didn’t use slam cuts before Kubrick and this book was about how this language emerged. Yeah, remember that book, the one the ticket inspector recognised.

“Your brother didn’t like it? It’s great.”
“Oh he liked the book, he just found he couldn’t watch films properly any more. He couldn’t enjoy them once he kept seeing how it all worked.”
“Ah, shouldn’t be a problem for me, I’ve always seen the joins, I just felt I couldn’t admire them until I understood them.”

Many years ago I came into possession of a signed picture of Terry Farrell. Terry played a character in the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine. I had actually interviewed her on the telephone earlier that year and asked her such probing questions as, “What’s your favourite drink?”. It was Diet Coke, for reference.

But now I had this picture that clearly needed protecting. The best way to do that would be to frame it. But I had a problem, it was already 9 o’clock at night. What to do… Well actually it wasn’t that much of a problem, I lived right in central London. Zone 1 baby! Round the corner from my place was a 24-hour framers. Man, they have everything in London.

I headed out. And then I learned that the 24 hours represents how long the framing would take rather than the opening times. Honestly! Don’t they realise that people need things framing round the clock? We don’t want to wait!

An archive article at long last, we haven’t seen one of those in a while ironically. In these articles I take a look back at a thing from gamboling of yesteryear – this time Auto Antonyms.

Why different species can’t mate – http://gamboling.co.uk/2006/08/28/why-different-species-cant-mate/

When casting about for something to write for the site I tend to scan through my notebook. Today I was a bit surprised to find this nugget:

Optiplex superhero without superpowers except he can shoot yellow beams out of his eyes. Controlled experiment with eyepatch. Doesn’t light things up – useless in dark. Placebo effect.

I mean… What on earth is that about? I think an Optiplex is actually a kind of Dell computer. But beyond that? I’ve got no idea.

When I were a lad you didn’t have the internet… Well you might have if you were one of the five government scientists who were keeping it all locked up before they all decided to relax, chill out, let their hair down and distribute some of those lovely IP addresses. And in those days they used to have these things called newspapers. They were these things which had yesterday’s news written up and printed on them. Of course there was already news on the television and the radio so they still didn’t really report news live but sometimes you’d read about something in the newspaper you didn’t know about that had happened yesterday. But then the internet came along and they all died out. People said it was because the internet was free, but of course the real problem was that you had to cut down bamboo to make newspapers and that’s bad for pandas… Or what I’m trying to say is that it was because of the distribution model. It was always out of date once the internet was there. The best you could hope for was for it to be only half a day out of date by the time you read it.

Of course I have always loved reading, so I used to read newspapers until they died out. And even then they had realised that something was a bit wrong and so they kind of reduced the amount they focused on news. They really should have been renamed Opinionpapers but people would have got upset and written to the editor of the newspaper saying that it was ridiculous to just make up words and telling them that if they didn’t change it back to newspaper, they would cancel their subscription. They wouldn’t seem to notice that somebody had cancelled their sense of irony previously.

So here’s a weird thing. A few years ago the school my mum was working at decided that it wanted to get rid of its bird collection. Its collection of dead birds in a box. Birds that had been stuffed. But apparently you can’t sell these birds because at least one of them was rare and of course the sale of them would encourage people to kill them to sell them. The school didn’t know what to do because if nobody wanted them they would have to just throw them away. And somehow throwing them away would be a far worse crime against these dead birds.

Well you can imagine where this is going I ended up with the birds and since I have owned them I haven’t really known what to do with them. It’s make or break time for the birds so they are currently sitting in our living room on display. I think I quite like them… but I can’t be trusted. Would you be freaked out if you came to visit?