The annual wine-tasting extravaganza in Bordeaux must surely rank as one the most high-pressure weeks in any industry. For one week, the great wine makers of France open their doors and allow the critics and tasters into the estates in order to taste their new vintage. A whole years worth of toil and effort, of baking outside in the sun, diligently watching your grapes get ripe enough, yet not too ripe. A whole year of hoping that there is enough rain, but not too much rain, hoping for a gentle breeze, crossing your fingers against an out-of-season frost. All this waiting, and then gentle harvesting, mulching and decanting into perfectly seasoned old barrels - knowing that every single thing has to be absolutely perfect, not allowing any imperfection to get into the process at any stage.
And for all that effort, you are rewarded with a week that will decide whether you make a million or a half-million, or whether in fact you will have a job next year. And on the imprecise science of the tastebuds of critics who have managed to become taste-makers. I can't imagine whether this would work in any other industry - if Apple made their new product, but it's success didn't rely on mass-market appeal, but on the whims of an uber-geek, would they realistically have been able to continue? What if that uber-geek simply didn't like listening to music while on the move: they would have been dead in the water with their launch of the ipod.
Thursday 8 April 2010
Wednesday 7 April 2010
The "new" Doctor Who - review
So, the "new Who" era ends, to be replaced with the "new new Who" era. I think that any comparisons with the Russell T. Davies flavoured series will be a bit premature after only one episode, so I will wait until the end of this new run until I give my full review, but the early indications are good.
The episode itself was a bit hit and miss, but such is the way with series openers - you have to introduce new characters, new plot devices for the series as a whole, AND you have to have a decent story that will hold it all together and stand by itself. There were enough interesting things going on to hold the attention, filled with the usual Steven Moffat motifs: the everyday things being subverted into something more sinister, such as the crack in the walls and things just being in the periphery of your vision. It also acknowledged the geekier elements of the fanbase, with plenty of potential clues and/or red herrings to satisfy the internet detectives who will pore over every detail of the series.
The writing was also very good: it wasn't a classic Who (or Moffatt, come to that) story by any means, but it was a very different beast for the executive producer - rather than providing the chillingly terrifying episode, as he normally does, he had to write something else entirely, and to these end it was entirely efficient, with some excellent lines across a lot of the characters.
I do like the new Doctor as well - I had a lot of goodwill for Matt Smith, who I wanted to succeed in the role, and there is enough evidence to suggest that he will be a success. I quite like the fact that he stopped off mid-plot to change his outfit, and I hope that this attention-deficit part of his character continues throughout the series - I quite like the idea of the Doctor being intensely relaxed about the whole "saving the world" thing, instead of being angsty about the burdne he carries with him. In an ideal world, he'd stop off at a newsagent to get a can of coke or a mars bar, before continuing on and demolishing a couple of daleks.
The episode itself was a bit hit and miss, but such is the way with series openers - you have to introduce new characters, new plot devices for the series as a whole, AND you have to have a decent story that will hold it all together and stand by itself. There were enough interesting things going on to hold the attention, filled with the usual Steven Moffat motifs: the everyday things being subverted into something more sinister, such as the crack in the walls and things just being in the periphery of your vision. It also acknowledged the geekier elements of the fanbase, with plenty of potential clues and/or red herrings to satisfy the internet detectives who will pore over every detail of the series.
The writing was also very good: it wasn't a classic Who (or Moffatt, come to that) story by any means, but it was a very different beast for the executive producer - rather than providing the chillingly terrifying episode, as he normally does, he had to write something else entirely, and to these end it was entirely efficient, with some excellent lines across a lot of the characters.
I do like the new Doctor as well - I had a lot of goodwill for Matt Smith, who I wanted to succeed in the role, and there is enough evidence to suggest that he will be a success. I quite like the fact that he stopped off mid-plot to change his outfit, and I hope that this attention-deficit part of his character continues throughout the series - I quite like the idea of the Doctor being intensely relaxed about the whole "saving the world" thing, instead of being angsty about the burdne he carries with him. In an ideal world, he'd stop off at a newsagent to get a can of coke or a mars bar, before continuing on and demolishing a couple of daleks.
Thursday 1 April 2010
new favorite design blog
http://grainedit.com/
They seem to be able to find a whole load of cool design work - I really like some of the modern shizness they have on there. I'm dranw more towards the really simple design pieces that they have on there - I find them more striking than things that are really cluttered and full of busy-ness
It really makes me wish I had paid attention in Design & Technology a bit more, instead of just tracing words using the font pages we had. And that I had more drafting skill, obviously.
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