I have about three or four nearly finished blogs which I've not quite gotten around to posting yet, so it is with great glee that I thank the mighty Christopher Tookey, for giving me the inspiration to Kick myself up the Ass and throw all of them on the back burner and write this instead.

Who is this guy you might ask? Well, a quick basic summary would be "regular Daily Mail film reviewer" which might already tell you all you need to know. Those with good memories might recall how much of a storm that shoddy excuse for a newspaper tried to create over a certain David Cronenberg film from 1996, entitled Crash. To cut a long story short, a load of movie critics called Crash dull, boring, poor, not a great film, that kind of thing... Tookey called for it to be banned, under some crazy impression that people watching it might suddenly discover they all want to have sex whilst crashing cars, thus causing a worldwide cult style pile up.

Apparently he thinks anybody aroused by car accidents would never discover this watching an episode of Casualty or ER. But his strangely over sensitive view of the world gives you an idea into how his mind works, especially as he claims to have defended other films against harsh critics, such as Reservoir Dogs. I've never quite understood the Monkey See Monkey Do presumption he seems to exhibit here, it lacks consistency. He thought that someone cutting another persons ear off whilst listening to music, nobody will copy that, but watch James Spader trying to crash a car whilst having a hard on, people are going to suddenly discover previously latent sexual deviancies that they never knew existed and suddenly begin acting on them.

Is this man worried that whilst leaving the car park of his local Tesco's some mad lunatic is going to come madly crashing into his car brandishing an erect penis? Or is he merely worried for the rest of us, because he goes to Waitrose and nobody sexually perverse would ever buy their groceries there?

I would say not, because of what followed. Whenever someone campaigns for the banning of something as innocuous as a below average film, needless to say the more liberal of us start shouting them down and pointing out how stupid and knee jerk their reaction is. In the case of Crash, various other critics came out and defended it for what it was, a below average film and not a hub of the devil's masterplan Tookey believed it to be.

Then what did Christopher Tookey do in reply to this hubbub? He wrote an article about how he had unfairly become a hate figure for the liberal establishment, you can read this if you can be bothered to pay for it (I wouldn't bother myself) over at Prospect Magazine's website. Remember this turn of events, it is somewhat connected with what comes later.

Now, one might take the view here that this guy decided upon the campaign in the first place because it suited the sort of shameless self promotion needed to feed an ego expanded above it's station. One that would drive a person to become the vice-president of The Critic's Circle, or not as it happens, apparently his stance on Crash blew his chances of that position. This is the view I currently hold.

At this point, as we are analysing his personality, I'd like to bring up a quote by Tookey in an article for The Observer from 1997, in which he says, "It has brought home to me that I have seen so much violence on screen... that I have become desensitised. Talking with the others on the street, I was noticeably less affected by the sight of this guy bleeding to death. After the killing, a number of people had nightmares. Shouldn't I have? It was my lack of reaction that was so chilling."

Is this some sort of insight into the dangers of desensitisation that watching too many movies can bring you? For me what is far more chilling, is to experience that, connect it with the fact you watch too many violent movies, and then carry on watching violent movies. Or perhaps this is just a case of some people are more affected by things than others, but it makes a good line in an article. But I digress...

Fast forward to 2010, a Marvel comic book based flick called Kick-Ass, written by Jane Goldman and directed by Matthew Vaughn hits the screens. I've not seen it yet, I stopped going to the cinema when I finally reached my limit of tolerance for people talking, and having to get up and complain because whatever film we were watching was out of focus, in the wrong aspect ration, playing in stereo and not 5.1, and the projectionist hadn't noticed. But I'm definitely going to get it on DVD when it comes out, it sounds a lot of fun.

Whilst it is comic book based, kids running around swearing and generally being super heroes isn't quite the angle on the film that Tookey has taken, he claims, "It deliberately sells a perniciously sexualised view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever."

But before you take that too seriously, he also says, "Children carrying knives are not cool, but a real and present danger." Well thanks for that, without you to tell us these things we'd never have known. Which reminds me, I need to take back that set of steak knives I'd bought my niece for her 2nd birthday. I thought she could learn to cook with them, but it's clear to me now she'll just go and join a gang.

Other worrying quotes in his "review" include, "Do we really want to live, for instance, in a culture when the torture and killing of a James Bulger or Damilola Taylor is re-enacted by child actors for laughs?" I mean, wow, just wow, how did you get from this movie to that horrendous act? Is this the new Godwin's law or something?

I could dissect his appalling review, but it seems cruel having not seen the movie yet myself, so I'll leave it up to someone who has, Dom Farelli and his wonderful blog entry. What I am going to take serious issue with, is the pathetic follow up article Tookey has had printed in the Daily Fail, and posted unabridged on his website. Yes, the ego it is so huge, it has a whole website.

Remember his article in Prospect Magazine that I mentioned earlier, in which he claimed to have been attacked heavily (I would say deservedly so) by the liberal elite? That was a laughable article, but one that at least didn't plough the depths that this new one has.

If the title of, "HOW I FELL FOUL OF THE INTERNET LYNCH MOB", and the subtitle of, "I believe this is one of the most important pieces I have ever written about film. Please read it with care, and link to it if you have your own website." doesn't make you sit up and take notice, what will? This is clearly going to be a major piece of journalism, I think to myself in an ironic fashion as I read.

And then as I read the first line proper, it says, "Cyber-bullying is a plague of epidemic proportions." and suddenly you know where he is going with it. You see when Crash came out in 1996, the Internet was rather small and insignificant. Now we can't even have a general election without the media  claiming the Internet as being the most important battleground, even if that turned out to be false and it is all boiling down to a few hours of TV debates.

After chucking out a few statistics on the subject, which is a serious problem for kids, he moves on to say, "But cyber-bullying is not confined to children and teenagers." And I start to think, oh dear god, is this guy really going to equate the internet reaction to his loathsome review to the horrendous cyber-bulling that some of our youth now endure? Surely he can't be, surely? And then he does...

"I can say this with authority because I recently joined the ranks of the cyber-bullied, thanks to a review I wrote of Kick-Ass in the Daily Mail on April 2nd", says Tookey.

The sad fact here is, he makes some genuinely good points in the article, all of which are overshadowed by the waah waah waah of how people have treated him on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Oh the poor man, someone has created a Facebook group where people write nasty things about him.

Christopher Tookey, you are a shameless self promoting egotistical twat. That isn't me cyber-bullying you, it is me making a social commentary based on your reviews of Crash and Kick-Ass, and subsequent articles published by you relating to how badly you've been treated for doing so. In actual fact, I don't think anyone has treated you any differently, you wrote stuff, people wrote stuff, big deal.

Like it or not, you are a public figure, you post what many people believe to be controversial views. You accused a film of promoting paedophilia, and by proxy anyone who enjoyed the said film of being a paedophile. And then you had the cheek to equate the reaction you received to that of poor innocent kids who can be driven to suicide simply because they are different, or even not actually different most of the time.

Shame on you Tookey, shame on you. Rather than watching a man bleed to death and wondering why it didn't give you nightmares, how about wondering why when people strongly disagree with your publicly spouted opinion and start shouting names at you, instead of it giving you a small insight on what it must be like as a teenager to be on the receiving end of hatred that has NOT been incited, you decided to make it all about you.

Posted by Robert John Shepherd

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So yesterday, I got yet more spam in my inbox, amongst the usual crap pretending to be from banks I have no accounts with, and Nigerian scams (it is quite sad to have a type of scam named after an entire country, I feel for the innocent populous there) I got an unsolicited email from a company called Scienta Data Ltd, under the trading name of Train2Game.

"This email was sent to you using data that has opted in to receiving information from third parties" it said, well bollocks to that I say. I am, and have always been, religious in my ticking (and not ticking) of checkboxes that opt out (or don't opt in) to third party emails. Because I hate spam, I get enough genuine mail in my inbox without having to deal with some company trying to sell me crap I have no interest in, and in my opinion actually don't believe is remotely capable of delivering anything like what it promises.

You see this company is flogging distance learning in what it calls "Computer Games Developer and Designer" courses. Yeah guys, I'm sure people doing this course will earn £20-£25k in their first year and get a "secure future" with "transferable skills." Actually no, I am pretty sure that you won't, all you will be is a fair few quid worse off.

Trouble is, everyone thinks they can design a great computer game, much like they can do a better job of managing our national football team. This sort of course (and the marketing behind it) just seems to me to feed on that niavety.

Want to know more about Train2Game? Read more on the wonderfully bitter Sega obsessed site UK Resistance who were apparently threatened with legal action for bitching about this company, or read about them on NewRetro.

Anyway I digress a bit, my real annoyance here is how stupidly pointless UK anti-spam leglislation is. Firstly it doesn't cover spam sent to anything other than private addresses, secondly I've complained to the authorities through official channels about spam I am getting to my personal address (which was farmed years ago from a gaming website that stupidly made them public) yet they never fine anybody.

That's the problem, if the worst that can happen to you as a company (or even an individual if you are one of those annoying sellers on ebay who thinks just because someone bought something off you they can spam you as well) is someone says stop sending emails to this person, where is the deterrant to be respectful of people's right not to receive unsolicited email? The law is supposed to allow the government to fine you, but I've never heard of it happening, so it is about as useless as those signs which tell you letting your dog crap on the park can result in it costing you money.


This Week's Videos

Everybody loves a bit of Shatner, so here is a bit of Shatner.



And secondly, because I like a bit of science, especially pretty what-would-happen-if kinds of science. An old ripped-from-VHS video of two smoke rings colliding.



Posted by Robert John Shepherd

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This is a cautionary tale, ladies and gentlephones, one which begins either late Friday night, or early Saturday morning, a few weeks ago, the exact timings are unclear. It may not be the most exciting story, nor is it the sort of revolutionary epic which inspires a new generation to rise against the hypocrisy of its government and reinvent politics of its time. It is however entirely true, and living through it was bloody annoying.

First a recap, at the beginning of September we began moving our websites from our own ageing servers which sat in a rack at TelecityRedbus in Docklands, to new rented machines at UKFast. We managed to migrate all our email, DNS and websites to the new machines with very little problems. So far, UKFast have been pretty much what every IT person wants from a hosting company.

Our actual domain names have been hosted with Easyspace for a fair few years, we originally had our main one on Demon but moved it to Easyspace after having problems with Demon's hosting of it. I seem to recall that whole fiasco peaked on a Friday with someone on their tech support promising to do something domain related, and then sodding off home for the weekend instead.


The Day We Lost The Internet

So this brings us up to about Friday last week, when we had two DNS servers running, our primary at UKFast, and a backup secondary running on my ADSL line at home. Everything seemed to be fine, until that is local contractors took out a few hundred telephone lines in my local area at the weekend. We have a lot of phone lines into this place of work, two of them were completely dead, one of those carried our Business ADSL connection.

What is a Business ADSL connection? Well generally one considers paying more money for the same thing as a domestic connection, but with the word Business in front of it, means if things are broke then they need to get fixed sooner rather than later. Needless to say this was also on a Business phone line, so you'd think the worst case would be 24 hours of downtime?

Think again! The damage done, cutting off hundreds of local people, would take best case 7 days to fix, but may even take up to 10 days. That's 10 days without internet access, the phone lines we rely on for our businesses, thank you very much BT, thank you very very much.

But our contract is with Demon, we still have other working phones in the house, maybe they can help us? Well the best they initially offer is to move our ADSL to another phone line which will take 7 working days. How is that any help? After talking to 5 different people for quite a long time, eventually they have a better offer, they can do it in 3 days but we have to pay about £150 and get locked into a new 12 month contract with a company we've been toying with leaving for the last few years because their support has gotten so bad.

Time to change ISPs, so long Demon, you used to be good (apart from the domain incident) and we've been with you since our very first leased line all that time ago (15 years is it?), but now your support has become so terrible and unhelpful if any issue pops up I despair at having to ring them.

A little tip for any budding ISP support people out there, if the person ringing you up is IT literate, do not repeatedly ask them to ping microsoft.com or power cycle their router when they ring up to report a line fault. And even if you insist they ping something for you, don't tell them exactly how to open the start menu, and browse for the command prompt.

So I ring up Zen, they can also do it in 3 days for an additional £150, which appears to be BTs standard charge. Since it was BT who are responsible for us having to do this in the first place, it seems BT will refund us that charge at a later date so all is good. Incidentally, a few friends of mine use Zen and find their connection excellent for gaming, and their support top notch.

Zen must be doing really well, because both times I ring the sales line they answer with a mere hello, no mention of the name of the person I'm talking to or any offer of how they might help me. Someone send these people on a training course, I wasn't even sure I'd gotten through to sales when they picked up. Unless they really are doing so well they can afford to be so nonchalant towards new customers.


So How Does All That Kill a Website?

A good question I hear me ask myself, what has websites hosted in Manchester got to do with our ADSL in London? Well, come Monday morning I'm reading threads on the photography forum my World of Warcraft guild (which includes many good friends) uses. It seems some people can't see a picture I posted that is hosted on our new servers.

Well that's odd, so I check the servers everything appears to be up and running. But also something even worse is apparent, I've been checking the traffic stats on Google Analytics almost daily the last week or two, checking to see if recent changes we made to our sites for search engine optimisation are having the effect I intended. Since Sunday our traffic has dropped to nearly zero, what the hell is going on? This is all I need, not only am I struggling to access the internet with a make shift 3G dongle due to no ADSL, trying to sort out our ADSL, now I have this to deal with?

I check the servers, they all seems fine, I get friends to check them and they have trouble resolving the domain names. It's a DNS issue, I bloody hate DNS issues, mainly because they can be troublesome at the best of times. Looking back, here is what I think happened...

The root domain servers think we have two domain name servers on ns0.reviewer.co.uk and ns1.reviewer.co.uk, despite me changing them a few times on Easyspace (who host our domain names) to ns1 and ns2. Now ns1 is currently at UKFast, with ns2 being on my ADSL at home, the latter obviously down and out of the game at this point.

However that should still be okay, the secondary backup server on ns2 is just that, the backup server. ns1 should still be accessible. At least it would be, if the root domain servers really thought that ns1 and ns2 were where they should be. It turns out that Easyspace's system for changing them may be buggy, or perhaps there is some other mystical process here I don't understand.

These root servers had wrong information for the reviewer.co.uk domain, which is the most important we own because not only does it host our most high profile and high traffic websites, primary email addresses, and so on, it also contains the ns1 and ns2 entries that all our other domains (such as MyReviewer.com) rely on for their DNS.

They believed that the name servers were at an IP we used in our racks at docklands (now down because of the move) and a backup on my ADSL at home (also down) and no amount of trying to change them with Easyspace's control panel would fix it. It seemed for the last few weeks, the ONLY name server which was working sat on my ADSL line. So even though at some point in the future I would have noticed and fixed this problem, for now the internet thought our backup DNS server was our only server, and death of our ADSL killed that.

As our domain data on name servers around the internet started to expire, traffic began to drop, amazingly one single person from our forums still resolved the old addresses. I don't know why or how, but he had become the Omega Man.

So anyway I sent a critical support ticket in, which takes them bloody hours to even reply to, after which they just send a mail asking me to confirm what I was asking them to do. I'm sorry guys, but when you are losing emails, website traffic and money, you do not want to spend 6 hours waiting for somebody failing to help you.

At this point I took the only sensible option available to me, bearing in mind it was now past 1am. I forked out £15 to have Easyspace transfer the domain to UKFast, despaired at the fact this could take 3 business days to happen, and went to bed. When I woke up, the domain transfer had gone through, and I could use UKFasts system to enter one correct nameserver entry. Minutes later traffic began flowing to the site, mail started appearing, and all was once again well.

Now what have I learnt from those few days? Nothing new unfortunately, but I can offer the following advice. If you have a service that you care about, make sure you are responsible for as much of it as you are competent enough to be responsible for. Then make sure anything out of your control is looked after by people who care, and you have some way to contact them.


This Week's Videos

Been a while since I did some of these, so here we go! First up The Axis of Awesome 4 Chords, which is a good lesson in how diverse a selection of music can originate from the same four triads.




And as I like to have related vids in these updates, here is the other side of the music coin, good old fashioned dancing. What better reason to dance for than Jesus?



Posted by Robert John Shepherd

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