The end of Dexter still bothers me

(Spoilers. For Dexter) After watching Dexter for eight seasons, I was expecting big things for the last few episodes. I wanted to see what they had been building towards the whole time. Would Dexter finally be revealed and be hunted by his friends? Would he lose his grip and descend into nasty madness, and still nobody would notice? Whatever it was, they'd been promising big things for years, and it would be worth the wait. Except, as it turned out, they didn't really have anything.

The problem is, I thought it was a different show. It's not adventurous. At least, it hasn't been for a long time. The writers were taking it season by season, making important things up as they went along. The decision they made, in the end, was to make Dexter nicer. So nice that it turned out he didn't have to kill anybody, even though he always told us he did. And an irrelevant villain appeared in the last few episodes. And everyone hung around cooking lovely dinners until Dexter could get on a plane. There were new characters, new developments, and other things that didn't matter at all, because all I wanted was the insane explosion of a season I'd been promised. It didn't happen, and then poor Debra, who had put up with a lot, died, and it was even sadder that by that point I didn't seem to mind. The last episode was strangely boring, being mainly focused on whether Dexter's girlfriend could catch a bus. If I was ever really promised something, I didn't get it.

And what would Dexter do? Would he get away with it? Would he be killed? No, he... did something irrelevant. It wouldn't have seemed so bad if he had ever mentioned lumberjacks, or said something about logs, or beards, but he didn't. It came out of nowhere. I understand that he wanted to live alone, but this isn't how television is meant to work. You can't introduce something random in the last minute. Eight seasons, I was watching this. Ninety-six episodes. Ninety-five hours, fifty-eight minutes, then lumberjack. He could have given us at a hint. He explained everything else to the ghost of his father inside his head, but not this. After all the murder and lies, the close escapes and near misses, the drama and the tragedy and the psychopaths, it finally comes to an end and then, lumberjack. I still don't understand.*

This was a good show, for at least the first four seasons. And the seventh. And even when it was bad it did a good job of pretending it wasn't. It's a shame, then, that I'll always remember that the end was nonsense.

* After reading this, it might not be the writer's fault.

Finding something good to read

Good books come from different places. A friend might recommend something to you. You might overhear something being mentioned. Sometimes a good book just makes itself known, by being in the right place at the right time, or by strange coincidence, or by just being really famous. Sometimes I don't know what to read next, but a good book always turns up, by the mystical forces of whatever. What doesn't work, is going to look for one. Especially on a computer. I don't think computers have any idea what a book is, even though they help to make them. To a computer, a book is just a collection of words that someone has typed, bits of data that become an object you can buy. Sites like Amazon don't give recommendations based on the real content of a book, they just know that somebody who bought this also bought that, and so you should buy it too. It's logical, but not very useful. Only a person knows what a good book is.

I made an account on Goodreads*. It's a website that recommends books. That's the whole point of it. You tell it all the books you've ever read and it shows you other things. I think, though, it might be a bit useless. My first mistake was saying I really like a Haruki Murakami book. It's response seemed to be, 'here are some more writers from Japan'. Never mind. And it's divided everything into genre, like fantasy, sci-fi, and 'mystery', because if there's one thing your book collection is missing, it's discipline. I've never thought, 'yes, I would like to read some science fiction now, I will go and look for some science fiction'. I just want something I'll enjoy. I don't know what genre things are half the time. Goodreads says that one of my favourites, The Road, is science fiction, despite that not being true at all.

The biggest problem with all this, though, is that it will never recommend something completely different to me. Something I never would have thought of. Only a friend can say 'this is brilliant, you should read it'. And that's the only recommendation I'm going to trust. Stupid internet.

*Like all social media, it does a good job of making you feel inadequate in a really blunt way. The first thing it tells me is 'You have no friends yet'. Oh.

No, but really, Google are actually making these glasses?

A while ago I wrote a post about Google's glasses, and their awful, awful video. And, to be honest, I thought they were joking. But it turns out they're making these things. They're glasses that do everything you'd expect a smartphone to do, except that it's on your face. The thing is, this is obviously a bad idea. Anyone can see that. Why would you actually want to wear one everyday, in your life? Who would want that? Apparently, some people do, according to their YouTube comments. "I've wanted something like this for years," says an actual person. At least you'll know who to avoid.

It looks silly, but real glasses probably looked the same at first. The problem is that you'll be talking to somebody with a contraption on their face, and they can take pictures, and record you, and analyse your voice patterns to send back to headquarters for processing. Every now and then they'll stop talking, go cross-eyed to check IMDB, and then look back at you, if you're still there. Then, distracted by the glowing icons in front of their eyes, they walk into a lake

It's obviously going too far. The main difference between this and a phone is that they don't want you to glance at it and then put it in your pocket, they want you to see through it all day. We're already constantly connected to the internet, so why do we need it on our face? It's adding technology to ourselves in a way that is far too invasive. Anyone wearing this would literally be seeing the world through the internet. It would become part of them. It's not so essential that we need to attach it to one of our senses. We don't need to look through a wall of icons and messages. That doesn't need to come first. What's even more sinister, is that this will be connected to Google's social network. Everything you see will go through them, turning people into Googlebots. They must realise this sounds fairly evil, but they're still doing it. It's like the start of an episode of Doctor Who.

I'm sure they mean well really, but outside of their imagination and a few silly people, who is going to want this?

Ten James Bond films

I've been watching the James Bond films in order from the start. There's a lot of them, and they're all mostly the same, but all mostly good. I realised I haven't seen a lot of them before, so it's a bit like connecting the dots between the famous parts. There's the bit where he runs over crocodiles. And the bit where the car flips over a bridge. And a woman gets covered in paint. And all this other stuff happens in between. So much stuff that I need to organise it. I need to make a list of some sort. A list that ranks the quality of the ten films I have seen so far, and is almost completely infallible.

1. Goldfinger
2. You Only Live Twice
3. Live and Let Die
4. Dr No
5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
6. From Russia With Love
7. The Man with the Golden Gun
8. The Spy Who Loved Me
9. Diamonds are Forever
10. Thunderball

I have no idea about On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It was, really, a bit boring. He spent a lot of time in a rubbish disguise in Blofeld's allergy centre and, well, I can't remember the rest of it. But it's the one that sticks out, because he gets married, and then he isn't married anymore, and George Lazenby is there. He's a different Bond. One that can't act very well, but seems vulnerable and more serious. This is a film that's better when you're not watching it. It's interesting, rather than brilliant. So it sits in the middle of the list, out of place and a bit awkward.

They are always rubbish when they end at sea. Things blowing up on the ocean are always boring in Bond films. The Spy Who Loved Me was going fine until the water-fortress bit at the end. Thunderball is too long, and most of it is incomprehensible swimming. Diamonds are Forever just isn't very good. These three films are at the bottom of the list. It seems that everyone likes The Spy Who Loved Me apart from me, but I did like half of it - the first half, when he was in Egypt. Then hundreds of people were running around a submarine, and I didn't care anymore.

There's a lot more to come. After watching the first ten, it seems like James Bond films don't really know what they want to be. Sometimes they're really silly, sometimes they're serious. They take weird detours into whatever is popular at the time (he goes into space in the next one; he's an astronaut). But they are always recognisably the same thing. He goes to other countries and kills people, and the women like him even when he's old. Some people say that the modern films aren't comparable to these, that the new ones are better in a different way. I think it's unfair to the quality of (some of) the new films. Casino Royale could have been made in 1970, if they'd wanted to, and it would have been just as good. There's nothing wrong with being silly, if it's done well. Compare You Only Live Twice to Die Another Day. They're both nonsense, but one is good and the other has computer effects. I'm trying to judge these films outside of the time they were made. That being said, there's still a lot of Roger Moore to get through.*

* I actually think he's quite good, but I'm feeling pessimistic about the rest of his films. There's a lot of them, and one is called Octopussy.

I watched The Cabin in the Woods

Considering the years of pain some people went through waiting for The Cabin in the Woods to be released, it felt a bit strange to just sit down and watch it. There was a time when it looked like this film was going to drown in a financial hole, making it a lost Whedon classic that nobody was actually going to be able to see. And after all that, I still didn't know what it was about, because every review was desperate not to tell me. As it turns out, it's a horror film. Or a version of a horror film. Part parody, part incredibly inventive horror-comedy-fantasy-sci-fi-action-adventure-thing. It enjoys playing with your expectations. Five killable friends go to a house in the forest that's a long way from the emergency services, but close to evil monsters. And when all the nasty things are happening in the woods, it cuts to a control room where Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins are controlling the horror. It diffuses the tension and adds a comic layer to what is already a lot of self-referential cleverness.

I could write about how postmodern this all is, and use more words like 'diffuses', but that would be ignoring the fact that this film is just a lot of fun. Despite all the gore, it's friendly in that familiar Whedonish (or Whedonesque) way. It doesn't really want to scare you. It wants to invite you into its club of nerdiness, where everything is an in-joke. And it works as a film. It's an hour and a half, cut down to the essential bits without a moment that drags. And it's got Bradley Whitford in it. If, like me, you've spent half of your life watching The West Wing, you'll just expect him to start shouting about voter turnout. But he doesn't. He looks like he's going to, but then he talks about zombies instead.