Spent a couple of days with Opera 10 beta, and I have to say it's looking good. A few observations:

• The new Mac theme is serviceable—and therefore a vast improvement over the old one—although it helps if you switch the colour scheme to anything except 'None'.
• The built-in mail server works fine, almost to the point of tempting me away from my current client of choice, Postbox. If only I could figure out how to set up some rules…
• The integrated spell-checker is an essential addition; the lack of one has turned me away from Opera more than once.
• The graphical tabs are nice, but the screen estate they take up renders them almost useless to me—in contrast to OmniWeb's implementation, which places them more efficiently on the left or the right.
• I haven't yet managed to achieve full marks on the Acid3 test, on 99%. Not sure what I've got set wrong, but there you go.
• As billed, facebook runs very smoothly.

There are so many things I love about Opera: integrated ad-blocking, mouse gestures, speed dial, the ability to reopen closed tabs, and even the mail, but in the end I always end up going back to Safari / Webkit. Opera has just never felt particularly Mac-like, and that's always been disconcerting, a friction between myself and the internet. The missing dictionary was a case in point: when every single app can access the Oxford dictionary built into OS X, an app which has no dictionary access whatsoever feels unbelievably crude. Opera 10 beta has gone a long way to overcoming this, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes next.
__________

Tags: internet, technology

*Contains spoilers*

I watched the first few episodes of The Bunny Boy Video Series by The Residents when they were originally released, but failed to keep up with them during the move to Magdeburg. Yesterday I listened to The Bunny Boy album on the way to work and decided to see what had happened to the Video Series when I got home, only to find that it had coincidentally just ended two days before, on 6 April 2009. So last night I downloaded the whole lot and sat down to watch.

Back to back, the 66 episodes (67 if you count the two-parter) take about two-and-a-half hours to watch. The episodes themselves are more like video diaries, shot from a hand-held camera by the Bunny Boy himself—who we learn is called Roger—although he eventually enlists help from a Russian friend named Igor. Most videos are single takes; cuts do creep into later episodes along with the occasional special effect (and glove puppets!), serving to undermine the impression that the videos are 'real', although I suspect that this was the intention in any case. The sleeve notes to the album state that the videos—supposedly posted to The Residents on a DVD—were the inspiration for their musical retelling, but the question of which came first is actually irrelevant. The videos describe events occurring after the release of the album, such as the Bunny Boy being persuaded to accompany the band on tour and seeking sponsorship for the show. The two approaches, video and album, essentially tell the same story through different media, rather like the stories which accompanied 2005's Animal Lover complimented the music.

The premise of the story is that Roger's brother Harvey has gone missing; not knowing where to begin searching for him, Roger records these short videos and posts them on YouTube in the hope that somebody will notice his plight and be able to offer help. Eventually clues start to come in, both from 'viewers' and by examining Harvey's belongings, and Roger is drawn to the small village of Patmos, Arkansaw. But this plot is more or less a Macguffin—Harvey is never actually found, and the only glimpses we have of him are torn up photographs. Indeed, it is never really clear whether Roger and Harvey are actually different people.

We learn that Roger went on holiday with Harvey's family to the Greek island of Patmos, where the Book of Revelation was written, and suffered a breakdown—to begin with he is unable to remember anything from the trip and is confused by a shadowy figure (himself) lurking in the family photographs. Harvey and his wife Hilda apparently became estranged after the failure of a dotcom company which Harvey attempted to launch, but Roger is still living in a 'secret room' in the basement of their house, surrounded with all sorts of paraphernalia.

Many of the scenes build on these ambiguities and can be viewed from the perspective either that Roger and Harvey are the same person, or that they are not. At one point, for example, Roger asks Harvey's daughter to make a plea for help on one of the videos, but she's too uncomfortable to do so; it isn't clear whether she's uncomfortable with recording the video for the voyeuristic public or whether the problem is rather that she finds it difficult to play along with Roger's delusions. One morning Roger wakes to discover a stack of boxes left outside his door by Hilda, apparently containing drawings and notes by Harvey; but again, we can't be sure whether Hilda passed on the notes to help Roger with his search or to snap him out of it.

But even this question is something of a Macguffin. I'm not sure that it really matters whether Roger and Harvey are the same person or not, and the lack of definitive clues seems to support this. What's important is how Roger sees the situation: that he really does have a lost brother, that signs seem to be pointing an Apocalypse which only he and Harvey can prevent, despite being consumed with doubt. If it's all a delusional fantasy, then it is still one which seems real to Roger, and all we can do is follow him. He may not actually fight the Beast in the cellar of a chicken farm, and it may all be a confrontation of himself; but then what matters is how Roger constructs his narrative.

Appropriately enough, social media such as YouTube and Twitter form an underlying critical theme in the series, as Roger attempts to get his message heard. To begin with he receives mostly spam; sympathy and criticism, when they come, are naturally from complete strangers, and both seem misplaced. He begins to don a rabbit costume when a viewer comments on his clothing, at first taking offence but quickly settling into the role. His 'viewers' become 'fans', both in his mind and in reality; in the end he receives sponsorship, with the unscrupulous Residents (!) selling the rights to his character (The Bunny Boy) and his predicament. The final episode gives us a taste of things to come, as an anonymous media company launches The All New Adventures of The Bunny Boy. What started out as a genuine plea for help is trivialised, sensationalised and commercialised: Roger is unable to keep himself separate, and his story becomes shaped by the media it adopts. This bitterness runs throughout the series: Roger is alone, occasionally indulged by those near to him, misunderstood and manipulated by those further away. The internet and social media do not really offer a solution, just more and greater disappointment.

All of this is, of course, purely interpretative. It's just what the Video Series meant to me. Others might see more in it, or less. But it's well worth watching.

The Bunny Boy Video Series can be downloaded from http://www.residents.com/bunnyboy/.
__________

Tags: internet, reviews

A site broken in IE elicits only a weary 'Meh' while a site broken in Opera demands urgent attention. I know it's a common courtesy to make sure that a site runs in as many browsers as possible, but a problem in IE just makes me shake my head in despair. A problem in Opera is far more likely to pique my interest and make me search for a solution.

I'm not even a regular Opera user, so why should I care? Because in my head, Opera fits into the category of 'good' browsers, while IE does not.
__________

Tags: internet

And hot on the heels of Safari 4 beta comes the news that OmniWeb will now be free, as The Omni Group admit that it is no longer under active development. Those of us who have been using OmniWeb for years and hoping for a radical update have suspected this for some time, and it's good to finally have it out in the open. Still, it's a great shame: OmniWeb was, and probably still is, my favourite browser; feature rich like Opera but streamlined in a way that the latter could hardly dream of being. But the recent development made it feel more than a little sluggish; I switched back to using Safari (Webkit, really) as my main browser some time ago, seduced by the speed and standards compliance.

I can't help thinking that maybe it would have been better if OmniWeb had just been retired completely, like Panic did with Audion.
__________

Tags: technology, internet

Finally finished reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky:

Young people are taking better advantage of social tools, extending their capabilities in ways that violate old models not because they know more useful things than we do but because they know fewer useless things than we do.

and:

My students, many of whom are fifteen years younger than I am, don't have to unlearn those things, because they never had to learn them in the first place.

Unlearning is the key.
__________

Tags: internet, technology

So AOL won't let me change the email address associated with my AIM account. Which is just plain dumb, since that address (mjharper@mac.com) is as dead as dead can be. Gone the way of the dodo. Expired, shuffled off this mortal coil. That sort of thing.
__________

Tags: ranting, internet