Film idea: That that brings them together

I've had a great idea for a low budget Brit-flick film thing:-

A group of strangers find themselves together in some kind of situation, I dunno, shipwrecked on a desert island, or stuck in a lift, or kidnapped by a genius psychopath, and after trying to figure out why they are there, they come to the conclusion that the thing that connects them is some shadowy person from their past, a mutual acquaintance, someone used to live with them, sold them a car, went to school with them, picked them up hitchhiking, whatever, this one person that they all know.

Then it turns out that he's got nothing to do with their predicament, and its just coincidence, like six degrees of separation, and after pinning all their hopes that its cos of this guy, they end up dead. Whatever mechanism or person that brought them together and killed them is just a little puzzled by their unexpected connection, but doesn't let it interfere with the sick but otherwise quite banal plan.

Later the shadowy bloke from their past reads about their deaths in the newspaper, gets a little freaked out that these disparate people who he knew all died together, but then otherwise just carries on with his day.

Life goes on.

CrimeTube.com and that woman being racist on the tram

Earlier today there was a tweet by Old Holborn on that twitter about the latest viral video, a woman having a racist rant on a crowded tram somewhere near Croydon. As is the norm these days the YouTube video became a news story and at around 6pm the BBC were reporting that the woman had been arrested. Some on twitter were calling for her kids to be taken away.

Anyhoo, as I am a completely normal user of the internet, well versed with porn websites, I've had this ace idea, a video website like RedTube, YouPorn, PornHub et al, but with youtube videos of people committing crimes. Viewers can submit ones they've found on YouTube, and people can watch and rate them. Then at around 6pm every day, the police can arrest the subjects of the top five most 'popular'.

It would be the greatest website since Hot Or Not. Everyone loves watching miscreants and rapscallions, remember the spectacle of the London Riots, now imagine a whole website of that sort of compelling footage. We may never again need the BBC or ITN for our crime porn.

Sure there'd be tawdry stuff, like burglary and assault, but cos its all ranked by views and ratings, the important stuff, like cat-trapping and racist rants, would float to the top.
Luckily the url crimetube.com is still available, but I can't do it, I've got no idea about websites, but anyhoo, I claim this website idea first, just like in that xkcd strip.

Dreams: Doom on the ZX Spectrum and Gameboy

I had a dream, well, not so much a dream, just this idea about computers and software and hardware, and how folk of my generation have seen home computer processing power improve and graphics improve, and maybe have a tiny inkling that back in the day, one guy in his bedroom could write the bestest computer game in the world, like Elite, but these days, it take a team of dozens of people.

Code used to be written really tightly to fit into a Vic 20's 20 kilobytes, or an Amstrad CPC's 64k or a Spectrum's 48K. Code had to be tight to fit, these days code sprawls and sprawls, and processing power always increases faster than the need to write tight code.

The limitations used to be things like how many colours you could have on screen at once, a pallet of 15 or 32 colours, resolutions less than 300 by 200. It seems so long ago. Now, the only colour limit it the human eye, and with screen resolutions, even the iPhone has the human eye resolution beaten. The limits for graphics are in terms of polygon count, 10,000 or 100,000 ain't much of a difference.

Anyhoo, what I'm imagining is if somehow could could get twenty-first century games on old 8-bit machines, with the graphical limitations inherent to them.

Doom.

I remember when I first saw Doom, the graphics blew my mind, on my dad's 486 DX2 PC. But compared to state of the art games graphics now, it was a bit pants.
What I wonder is, What would Doom look like on 8-bit machines?

Well, on the ZX Spectrum, 15 colours in two colour 8x8 blocks for a screen resolution of 256x192, it would look like this:-
And on the Nintendo Gameboy, four shades of green/gray at 160x144, it would look like this:-
I reckon the Game Boy version would be bestest.

It would be neat if I could be bothered to do some kind of gif animation of the action, but that's a little too much hassle. For the ZX Spectrum screen shot I used a utility called zxspectrumizer, from this chap and for the Gameboy screenshot I just used good old Photoshop.

UPDATE
Looks like some Hungarian mob put together an Spectrum version after all

Its a bit crap

This version of Wolfenstein 3D looks a bit better