Wings Over Scotland

So unsurprisingly, we're already knee-deep in the pre-prepared narrative: that the unacceptable and shameful violence of the student protests has destroyed all public sympathy, and there'll be no more softly-softly treatment.

Thank heavens. I'm all for protest, but I won't stand by and watch the police have to face down a terrifying bunch of 15-year-old kids, some of them armed with sticks, with no protection other than their body armour, riot shields, truncheons, horses, vans and helicopters.

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Call me naive or innocent or gullible or whatever, but I was really looking forward to Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights. The cheeky wee Glasgow scamp was more or less single-handedly responsible for making Mock The Week watchable – which I’m aware isn’t an exactly controversial view.

But what’s less commonly realised is that the reverse is also true.

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(Click for full size)

I especially love the line about "plunging Scotland into darkness for half the year", as if what our arbitrary human clocks say actually makes any difference to how much daylight there is.

Well, that’ll teach me to write a loving but very gently semi-critical appraisal of the iPad. Apple’s crack Unbeliever Punishment Squad was scrambled immediately, and within 24 hours punishment was duly delivered.

The main engine of retribution was to be – as is so often the case – the vile, stinking, loathing-fuelled execresence that is PC iTunes.

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Earlier this week we pointed out that for most people in Britain, the current economic crisis is in fact no such thing. If you're in the blessed section of what in modern times is an unprecedentedly polarised society, which is defined by home ownership – something the majority of adults are – then the chances are you're doing just fine out of the banking catastrophe of 2007-8.

So the widespread vilification of Lord Young of Graffham (above, centre) in this morning's press for accidentally saying out loud what most people already know to be perfectly true is a little… well, it's not surprising, exactly, but it's another nail in the tattered, sieve-like coffin of the concept of honesty between the people and their semi-elected leaders.

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As the growing horror that is the coalition government unfolds more hideously every day, the British people could easily be forgiven for harbouring a sense of complete and utter hopelessness.

The choices presented to them in May 2010 already amounted to little more than three slightly different shades of the same colour. But the moment when even any manufactured pretence at significant difference between the policies offered by the three major parties evaporated – the minute Nick Clegg got behind his Deputy Prime Minister desk – it became impossible to maintain the delusion that Britain remains a democracy in any meaningful sense any more.

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Alert readers may recall a few weeks back I gave an interview to a blog written by a bunch of – well, let's call them "games journalists" for want of a more accurate term. A straightforward enough business, you might think – ask questions, get replies, publish, done. It didn't work out quite that simply.

While the interview caused a huge hit spike on the site and an unprecedented number of comments (over 100 compared to their usual three or four), this sudden influx of visitors and attention caused great consternation among some of the blog's editors other than the charming and talented young writer who'd done the interview.

Two of them – a pair of particularly lily-livered Future Publishing corporate drones – whined all over Twitter and elsewhere that the (incredibly mild) arguments in the comments were so beastly and upsetting that they were considering deleting the entire site, rather than attract all these awful, horrid people (ie, readers) to it by speaking to such a nasty man.

Long story short, to spare the hurt feelings of the less-popular stories on their blog (which is to say, all of them) the interview has been quietly deleted. So I've retrieved it and posted it below for posterity.

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"…and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to tell which was which."

Man, I've been waiting for this to happen for ages. A long long time ago, when I was barely half as old as I am now, there was a magazine called Cut. A sort of artsier Scottish version of the NME, it was a music-and-culture-and-politics newspaper that came out either weekly or fortnightly, I forget which.

Either way, in 1989 Cut began publication of a comic strip written by Grant Morrison (the eccentric/mental creator of Zenith and The Invisibles, among many others), called The New Adventures Of Hitler.

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These are really quite something.

Posted mainly as an excuse to link to Newsnet Scotland, which is vital ongoing reading for anyone with any interest in events in North Britain generally, in the case of the "Lockerbie bomber", or simply in the BBC's increasingly open disregard of the impartiality laws which are supposed to govern its conduct.

In which WoS appears in a movie with Ricky Gervais!

Ish.

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It's one of the most-observed truths of videogame reviewing that the entire concept of scoring is, as practised almost universally in all forms of current print, broadcast and online media, fundamentally broken.

Everyone knows that the marks awarded in game reviews – whether out of five stars, ten points or 100% – are not in fact sequential numbers as we were taught them in arithmetic lessons, but abstract ciphers whose true value is heavily encoded. In videogame reviewing, 4 isn't any bigger than 2, 6=7, and 10 is more than twice as many as 9.

And therefore – since the sole and entire point of scoring is to attach an instantly comprehensible numerical summary of the reviewer's opinion to the text – videogame review scores are functionally almost meaningless.

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