The strangest of feelings

Bit of a flat week. I'm on campus for the whole week, for the first time in months; no trips to London, Paris, or dropzones on the cards until next week. I thought I'd enjoy just being here, my last few days of being a student, but instead I feel suffocated.

Maybe it's because it all feels over without being finished: the interesting parts are done but I can't leave it all behind just yet. Everyone's leaving, all my year's people are flushing out past the lake and beyond the fields. I've added a thousand people to my address book this year, but now we're last year's cohort the sense of excitement and cameraderie has faded. I'm glad I could participate while the year was running hot, but the importance of those connections is fading fast.

Got to get out. Instead of working away on my dissertation here in my Lakeside room, I'm relocating. The library, the Learning Grid, somewhere. Got to get out, to feel my University around me.

Turning Phelps from champion to star

I shouldn't really be worried about Michael Phelps: the brilliance of his 8 golds at the Olympics means he'll be worth tens of millions by year end. But can a swimmer, without the canvas of a national league sport, thrive over time?

By all accounts Phelps is one of the good guys. Like Tiger Woods, there's something fundamentally okay about him: you can smell he's drug free, and as a swimmer I know just how technically skilled you have to be to be competitive in the water.

Phelps has the potential to become an inspiring icon, like Woods. But I'm concerned that after the talk shows the brand equity will start to die, and something richly deserved just won't happen. There are plenty of terrific athletes who really struggle in later life. I just hope Phelps gets the right media strategy and the right financial advice, so that even if he's a one-season wonder he'll be fixed for the future.

Little doggie, bark all day

Here's a thing: I posted a thread about a news story on one of Britain's oddest, but most loveable, networking sites - Ecademy - and got repeatedly squealed at by a rather odd little troll-type individual, reminiscent of one of those yappy little dogs that do nothing except squeak 24 hours a day. I thought this sort of behaviour went out with Usenet. Actually the guy's done me a favour: reminded me that there are regions of the Internet where the trolls still thrive.
You know the type: they've got an opinion, and it's vitally important to them that you should really, really care about it.

As is often the case, it turns out the guy's a 'Macolyte', one of those so slavishly devoted to the Apple cause it's eliminated their ability to engage in rational debate or take part in civil exchanges. Bullied at school, I suppose; trying to work up a tough-kiddie persona online to make up for inadequacies elsewhere. (The briefest of Googles revealed he posts with the same shrillness pretty much everywhere, with an expectedly high proportion of "this comment has been deleted"s.)

I'm not attacking this individual in particular; he just happens to illustrate a type. I've worked with guys like this, and regrettably even employed one once. The interesting question is: Why they do this? Surely they don't get results: behaving this way tends to drive down respectability towards zero. And if they stepped outside their little circles of pique for a moment they'd realise how silly they look. The Mac guy here is probably of normal intelligence with strong technical skills, yet he's hurting his employability and prospects by being so... daft. They're sad little people, and I wish there was an easy way to help them.

Animated discussions

Getting animation this close to photorealistic humanity is a brilliant achievement. But will animation ever replace human actors?

My money: no. There's the economic argument, of course: as tools develop, it gets easier to do this, and in a decade synthetic mannequins may well be reading the news or introducing programmes, much as RSS feeds announce things by text today. But doing things the easy way is rarely a recipe for quality, for the same reason a MIDI symphony sounds phoney.

MIDI caused great excitement when it came out (I'm showing my age here); everyone thought digital recordings of real instruments, rather than synthetic beeps, would trounce paying live performers - a series of codes read by a computer simply got outputted as music. It didn't work that way, because the music sounded flat; no heart or soul in it, a grab-bag of sound effects rather than an integrated swoooosh of sound. Tiny edge effects create the sense of a performed work, but that's where the music lives.

Translated onto video, those edge effects are the little tics and flicks that make 'Emily' look real - random eye movements, head-tosses, that sort of thing. But even these were modelled from real actors. The virtual actor is entirely dependent on real people.

Furthermore, so much of acting has nothing to do with appearing on screen. Box office takings rely on celebrity; unless it's animation to begin with, a successful film needs 'the money', a star name, someone who gives great red carpet and gets papped on the streets of Hollywood. Most cinemagoers don't go for the film; they go to see a star. And the appeal of virtual stars, from Max Headroom to AnaNova, is just a novelty factor.

My old fighting technique is unstoppable

Apparently there's a dispute between the monks of the Shaolin Temple, birthplace of Kung Fu, and the upstart temple Tagou down the road. The Shaolin guys don't want to take part in competitions, and the Tagou guys say it's because they're not good enough. I wouldn't want to be the Sunday Times reporter charged with investigating that story. "Here's your next assignment: go to the Shaolin Temple and ask them why they're turning into a bunch of wusses."

Once a copywriter, always a copywriter

Back at my hotel again, copywriting, in this strange netherworld between the greensward of a campus University and the madding crowds of London: a second day where the timesheeted hours ran uncomfortably into double figures. Scoffing some room service, quaffing a demi-bouteille (okay, bouteille) of reasonable Sancerre, in a great city a long way from home. It's just what I do.

(Aside: what, exactly, is wrong with Radisson Hotels? I've stayed here eight nights in the last three months and every time there's been something wrong. Not enough to complain about, and my client gets a discount on the Eur350 rack rate, but still...)

I don't write much actual copy these days; I've had Director of some sort or another on my business card since I hit 27, and I dream up perhaps five campaigns a year. But somehow, it's the job where I feel most at home. Kicking back, surrounded by people at Macs and in suits, creating stuff.

(Take just now. I ordered a main course and dessert: why, then, is there no spoon, just a knife and fork? And why are there last night's room service trays lined up down the corridor, at nearly 10pm? Or this morning, where nobody came round with the coffee can yet I got ticked off for going over there and taking it myself? These things matter.)

It's a strange profession, copywriting. Nobody ever knows your name - you don't sign your work in this business - yet you earn more on any measure than 99% of novelists and have a far higher audience to boot. And that's with a lifestyle that resembles that of a poet: sitting around scribbling ideas and sketches onto A3 pads and laughing a lot, trying to find that emotional hook that'll mess with a few million more minds this month.

(Look, I appreciate I'm not in Geneva, but - the hotel TV channels not even being tuned? And of the multiple times I've stayed here the air conditioning has never lowered the temperature to anything comfortably below 28deg? What's wrong with these people? Such little things with such great import to anyone new in town looking for a home without hassle for 48 hours? It's just stupid.)

This year Starbucks lost me as a customer FOR LIFE; I'll never go back, based on a single year's experience of just HOW crap they were getting. Their coffee grew terrible, their sandwiches hideously expensive, and their idea of being my 'third place' got resignated to my 'third way'. And I spent just a couple of pounds, every couple of days, at Starbucks. Why on earth would a major hotel operator risk business worth Eur350 a day for such a few, tiny things?

That's why I do it, really. Making a big deal out of a few, tiny things, like rack-and-pinion steering or multi-weather ABS on a small family car you see in improbably sun-drenched photos in the magazines. I've always enjoyed messing with people's minds.

(And this blog, if there are any Radisson managers reading, should really fucking mess with THEIR minds. Get your procedures sorted out. I know we're in France, but this is SICK!)

Back in the Radisson

Hit the hotel, after an eighteen hour day. Urgh. Was just about to order the creme brulee trio and had to stop myself. I mean, they do a cracking dessert at the Radisson, but the company here doesn't pick up EVERYTHING on the hotel tab, and spending E13 on a sweet treat is just obscene. The E12 chocolate fondant looks pretty good too... STOP!