Things That Have Been Bothering Me Lately

In no particular order:

• The ephemeral nature of youth and beauty.
• The concept of truth.
• Whether or not I'm gaining weight*.
• Whether or not feeling such concern for my appearance makes me a superficial corporate whore.
• The feeling that everyone in the world but me is out having fun.
• What's going on with Aethelread.
  
• If telling people I got my scars in a sword-fight/duel is funny or just pathetic.
• Having forgotten how to multiply fractions.
• Why anyone would drink Jägermeister voluntarily, ever.
• Wanting a copy of ...And The Ever Expanding Universe by The Most Serene Republic.
• Not being able to watch The Ashes because I don't have Sky Sports.
• Not wanting to pay money to a billionaire Australian tyrant in order to watch The Ashes.
• If I can get away with just listing my neuroses instead of writing an actual post.
  

* Up from 55kg to 59. All of which seems to have collected around my stomach. You may not think that's a lot, but to my mind I look like Nicholas bloody Soames.

Pride, Courage, Lesbians On Rollerskates And The Great Big God-Damn Book Of Judgement

Hell of a title, don't you think? So, I'm a man of my word (when it suits me) and when I said I'd go to the gay pride parade in London today, I meant it. I've been twittering about it the whole time, and now I'm back, trying to collect all of my thoughts.
The most important thing to say is that I had a fantastic time. Even if you're one of those weird heterosexual people, I can't recommend Pride enough; it's an absolute spectacle. On a personal level, I'm really pleased that I managed to get up there and enjoy myself in spite of all the anxiety I was feeling beforehand, because it would have been really easy for me to talk myself out of it.
So I got to the start at Baker Street early, in time to watch the floats setting up. I had a couple of cigarettes and watched people arriving. This was what it was like ten minutes after I got there:

click to embiggenate these, by the way

By way of comparison, this was it about an hour and three-quarters later:


I kept milling around in Baker Street until 1pm, and managed to take some interesting photos in the process.










Some bloke stopped me to moan about 'the glorification of the gays' in a thick northern accent, and then walked off when I asked exactly what was wrong with that. Apparently the National Front were around somewhere; I didn't see them, but they must have seen me because at one point I heard a characteristic Neanderthal voice directed at me. We didn't have any more meaningful conversation than 'Oi, gayboy'. I've had worse invective directed at me than that, lads. Try harder next year.
Anyway, the parade was a little bit behind schedule so I walked amongst my brethren for a few minutes. In the process, I saw a drag queen with awesome boots, a mostly-naked DJ working out of the back of a milkfloat, and a large group of lesbians on rollerskates. I didn't get any pictures of them, unfortunately. In addition, many, many very pretty Londoners. By the end of the day, I was starting to feel more than a little inadequate by comparison. I also got my picture taken by a gay Jedi and a photographer from the British Museum.
Which leads me to one of my resolutions; next time I go to Pride, I'm not going on my own. I mean, it was fine, but by the time we got to Trafalgar Square I was seeing couples everywhere, and it was beginning to get to me. So, I have a major boyfriend-want going on. I shall have to either badger the youth group people about the youth group, or just start getting out more on my own.
That's not very relevant, though. The parade finally moved off, although it was start-stop for a while. I think the stewards were having to push people out of the way of the fire engine at the front. You'd think it'd be hard to miss a bright red truck covered in rainbow flags and balloons, with lights and sirens on. This was the front of the bit of the parade I was in:


It was looking a lot like rain at this point, which would have made for a) the world's largest wet T-shirt contest and b) several cases of hypothermia. Luckily, the weather held, proving once and for all that God, who totally exists and takes an interest in weather, is on our side. It having quite literally not rained on our parade, things got going. Here are some police, policing:


Eagle-eyed viewers will be able to detect that by this point, I'm not actually in the parade. This is because I'm a fucking idiot, and in the course of wandering off to get photos found myself stuck behind the crowd, and the crowd-barriers, for most of the parade. Which brings me to resolution two: stay. in. the. fucking. road.
The parade moved on, and I managed to get a few photos over the tops of people's heads and so on:










The parade's not actually moving in that last one, as the police had stopped it for a second. The reason why the police had stopped it for a second were these lovely people:




You can't see him all that clearly, but the bloke in the grey suit was the preacher. He looked (and sounded) like a mix of Ian Paisley and Dave Allen. Very disconcerting. Anyway, he was up on a pulpit with, I think, 'Zion Tabernacle' on it, shouting through a megaphone. I didn't pay a lot of attention to what he was saying, but I recall him telling us to 'be careful what you say, be careful what you think' and mentioning that it all went down in God's Permanent Record, The Great Big God-Damn Book Of Judgement (my words, not his).
I would have remonstrated with him, but there was an immobile line of police between us. They were visibly counting the minutes until their shift ended. Ultimately I settled for standing in front of the christianists for a while until the parade caught up, blowing kisses at them. This didn't go down very well.
The best part was that once the parade finally got going, everyone turned round and crowded back to the barriers to cheer it, leaving the preacherman to keep on preaching to our backs. I kept moving, and as I got further away from the counter-protest they gradually got drowned out by whistles and sirens (the firemen in the big gay fire engine up front were having fun with them, clearly).

the big gay fire engine

The time the parade had been stalled had put me right at the front, so I got some pictures of the fucking massive rainbow flag, and the political-types:






The placard-bearers were the Homintern. Best slogans: 'Fuck "no politics"', 'Homosexuality is a heterosexual concept anyway', 'fluff is not a lifestyle: gays must vote', 'I am not Graham Norton'. Worst slogan: 'BBC: Being gay does not equal rubbish'. Sentiment's right, but I feel it needs some work.
By this point we were nearing Trafalgar Square, a guy had just kissed me in the middle of the street to the point where I practically needed a crowbar to separate us, and I got a good look at the marchers who were actually marching:


They looked awesome, for the record. And kept their rhythm over the noise of a samba band. Alas, I didn't manage to get photos of the Navy, Police or Ambulance Service. I have one, blurry, weirdly-angled photo of the MoD people, much like Loch Ness monster 'proof':


We got into Trafalgar Square, but I didn't get any good photos at all. I did see them rolling up the über-pride flag:







The parade finished there, and I didn't stick around for any of the after-events (Resolution #3: Afterparty), as it felt a bit like pushing my luck. The heat was nearly killing me, for one thing. This was the main stage, though:


Oh, and this made me smile:


All in all, I'm really glad I went to Pride. I think it's important, not just to me but also politically. Plus, it was fun. I'm glad I made the effort, and I'm, well... proud that I managed it.
On the train home, I saw an old beer ad painted onto the wall of a house. Very faded, but still legible. In big white letters, 'TAKE COURAGE'. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

All Of Your Children Are Lesbians And It's All Madonna's Fault

I really meant to post more often, honest. I've just been so lethargic. It was the heat wot done it, your honour. Old people are dropping dead, birds are spontaneously catching fire in mid-flight, and so on. Given that fleeing to Canada or Russia isn't really practical, I suppose I just have to put up with it. You should know better than to assume that'll stop me complaining, though.
On the plus side, I finally managed to get all the paperwork done for sixth-form college applications. It was a lot more work than it needed to be, but it's been long enough since I actually thought about education last that it was never going to be an easy transition to make. Now it's just a question of waiting to hear back. If you're curious, I applied for AS-levels in English Literature and Language, History, Government and Politics, and Psychology (ya rly). That means dropping any kind of foreign language, but I figure I can always get qualifications in those later, even if it's just going to night school or something. To be honest, I had entirely too much choice in terms of subjects. For a while I was considering Sociology, but then I realised that I'm insufferable enough already.
There's something else potentially very interesting planned for the near future as well, but it'd be bad form to talk about it at the moment. Keep watching the skies. No, I don't know for what either.
So, for the rest of this post, I need something that doesn't take a lot of effort (what with the heat) but also gives me a sense of satisfaction. Let's give the Mail a kicking.
Actually, I found this via the wonderful Tabloid Watch, who beat me to it. Nonetheless, I feel that the more people you have calling the Daily Mail out on their bullshit, the better.
The shorter version of the article is this: celebrities are turning nice middle-class girls into lesbians. Or at least faux-lesbians:

Olivia and Lara had their first kiss at their friend Clara's 15th birthday party. That is, they first kissed each other [shock-italics in original] then. They'd both kissed boys before, and they will do so again, because neither girl considers herself a lesbian. But after a couple of drinks, they thought it would be fun to see how it felt to kiss each other.

Both girls come from smart homes with professional parents, are well-spoken and attend a well-respected Inner London day school.

Their close encounter occurred recently at a smart private house party, and was described to me while I was researching an investigation into teenage behaviour - during which this intriguing and disturbing trend came to light.

I can't speak to 'intriguing', obviously, but I fail to see exactly what's so disturbing about two girls kissing. I find the tone of the article disturbing enough, though; it reads like one of those 50s public-information films about the lavender menace. There's the rather prudish mention of alcohol, of course, but it's the class obsession that reveals most about how Mail hacks view their typical reader's mindset. This idea that we should be shocked because it's not just teenage girls kissing each other, but teenage girls with names like Olivia (ugh) and Lara. Why, those could be your children, Mail reader! You send them to a decent school and think they're safe from everything you don't like in the world, but you take your eyes off them for a second and all of a sudden it gets all Gestern und heute.
Anyway, this is all the fault of celebrities. No-one even knew girls kissed until Katy Perry wrote a song about it. Prior to Madonna and Britney Spears kissing on live TV, all lesbians looked like k.d lang. Now respectable girls are doing it!
In all seriousness, though, I really can't see there being a reason for this article beyond simple homophobia and victorian moralising. There's a bit at the end about it being a kind of 'pretend sexuality':

'Nowadays, the term lipstick lesbian pretty much implies someone who is pretending to be gay,'* says author Judi James, who has written extensively about celebrities.

'It describes the female, publicity-hungry celebrities who are desperate to get their pictures in the paper and who engage in kissing each other to do so.'**

'For them, the options to get coverage are: one, fall over and show yourself in a state of embarrassing undress; or, two, kiss one of your female friends. It's a posture; an attention-seeking measure.'

OK, so these girls are just 'pretending to be gay' (incidentally, 'has written extensively about celebrities' may be the best set of expert credentials ever). I really don't see how that's 'a teenage trend that will disturb every parent'***. I don't mind straight people 'pretending to be gay', anyway. Makes a nice change from gay people having to pretend to be straight.
There's some suggestion that girls are being peer-pressured into it by the dread celebrities, but that's more than a little [citation needed]. Besides, of all the things for teenagers to be peer-pressured into, I'd say this would probably be amongst the most harmless. I'll leave you with another paragraph from the article. The tone in which you read it on first viewing is a good measure of how close you fit to the homophobia the Mail expects from its readers:

For previous generations, exhibiting any type of gay behaviour was certainly considered 'harm done'. Being teased for being 'lesbian' was one of the more cruel taunts that could be hurled at a teenage girl. But today we're witnessing the emergence of a growing number of young girls who are willing to experiment with their female friends.

Frowning disapproval? Hand-wringing mewling about the decline of society? You'll fit right in.

UPDATE: Nice to see some of the Mail commentariat have taken a break from their usual 'Lesbians? Send 'em back to Lesbia if they can't fit into my outdated idea of British society' line for a moment of sanity. Some examples:

This is just ridiculous. Who are these paents who are 'worried'? I'm a parent, and I'd much rather my teenage daughter kissed a girl and liked it than felt coerced into having sex with boys, as the less 'sexually confident' girls of previous times did.

Oh my God, who in their right mind would be "disturbed" by this?! Girls have been kissing each other since the dawn of time, not since 2003! And why is it only a problem when "middle class" girls do it?

One big problem about this article - it assumes that being gay is a bad thing.
So what if girls want to kiss each other?! Or boys want to kiss each other?
If they don't like doing it they will stop!

* No it doesn't.
** No it doesn't.
*** Presumably 'every parent' excludes parents of out, gay children, who I'd imagine are fairly used to their offspring kissing members of the same gender.

Review: Prototype

If there is a god, they don't want me to review Prototype. In the course of playing it through, I had two distinctly unpleasant panic attacks, right before the game decided to break itself, uninstall Steam (?!), and then cut to a BSOD every time I tried to start it. But I am a relentless machine of pop-culture writing, so I battled through these obstacles to bring you this review.
So. Prototype, or to give it the correct marketing-wank title, [PROTOTYPE], is an open-world game in which you play a superhero-less-the-hero-bit fighting the US military in New York, as a rather nasty virus spreads across a quarantined Manhattan in arguably the worst possible instance of cold and flu season. The marketing hype made a great deal of promising gory, over-the-top combat (throwing cars at helicopters, for instance). But hype is hype, and rarely accurate, so the question is how well Prototype delivers on its promises.
Not very well, to be blunt. In a sentence: It's a pretty good idea, hamstrung by poor design decisions. Some things come off better than others; the parkour-inspired movement works very well, and it's a lot of fun to be running along the side of a skyscraper before jumping an obscene distance into the air and gliding onto the next rooftop. It's not as palpable as in, say, Mirror's Edge, obviously, but it flows well and it's fun.
Unfortunately, it's somewhat let down by the environment. We in the murder-simulator community have been spoiled by GTAIV, I think; we've become so used to the exceptional rendition of Liberty City in that game that the likes of Prototype's New York feel stale and anodyne by comparison. It doesn't help that for an open-world game there's really very little to do in Prototype's world; there are a handful of side-missions, all variations on the same basic four or five themes, and some Crackdown-style agility orbs to find, but other than that you're more or less restricted to going from one mission to the next.
The graphics, too, look a little dated. I'm not one of these people who insists that every game has to make my jaw drop to look at it, but it really doesn't help the perception of the game-world as being blocky and bland.
The combat is disappointing in many ways, partly because you can see what the developers were going for, which makes it even more galling when it goes awry. Aside from the inevitable escort missions, the inevitable protect-the-annoying-support-character-for-X-amount-of-time missions and the remarkably annoying tendency of enemies in the late game to rely on attacks that knock your character back, essentially taking control off the player for a few precious seconds, Prototype has what may be the worst-designed boss battle I've ever encountered. You're stuck in Times Square, slowly chipping away at the health bar of some colossal zombie-virus-thing, while fending off infinitely-respawning enemies. And they make you do it three times in a row. It's either shameless padding or terrible design, but it's immensely frustrating to play.
The story is nothing hugely special. The basic concept isn't a bad one, and again you can see what the developers were aiming for. It's just let down by a protagonist more wooden than a logging camp, and a stubborn refusal to let the player actually care about any of it. The one thing that does work well is the web of intrigue. Basically, this entails finding certain people in the world who know things relating to the plot, and taking their memories (it works better than it sounds). The short videos of what these people know are done quite well, and given more material and better writing to work with, could have been something special.
Anyway, to conclude, if you play Prototype you'll have fun hurling cars at helicopters and gliding around the world for a while, but sooner or later you'll get bored of that, and once you do there's really very little game left under there. It'll keep you occupied for a few days, but I doubt you'll be all that likely to come back to it. Maybe rent it or pirate it, but I wouldn't buy it.

i was going to find screenshots but i couldn't be arsed
take this as representative of my opinion of this game's importance

Fighting Monsters

Gaming industry, I have something to tell you. Well, frankly, I'm concerned for your well-being. We all are. Your friends, your family; the people who love you. This isn't a blog post, gaming industry, it's an intervention. We think you need to acknowledge your nazi problem.
...I know you don't think you have a problem, but you have to be honest with yourself. How many times have we heard you say that you could 'quit any time you want', and then watched you go back to texturing yet another Tiger tank?

we've all seen it

How many times have you told us that you were 'working on a new IP', that turned out to be another chance for you to indulge your obsession? Lately... well, lately it's gotten so bad that you stopped giving them proper titles, just strings of jingoistic buzzwords so you could make each one quicker and move on to the next fix. Maybe you don't believe me, but think about Call Of Duty. Medal Of Honour. Company Of Heroes. Men Of War. Those don't mean anything, gaming industry.
Maybe it's just because you saw your big brother Film experimenting with nazis, but he grew out of it. Sure, Tom Cruise is still making wank like Valkyrie, but there are all kinds of films now. Films about all kinds of places and all kinds of things. Different, interesting films, not one of them using the phrase 'Hände hoch, Amerikaner'. Film doesn't need to hide from the world behind a snarling 8-foot SS trooper.
We love you, gaming industry, and we can't stand by and let this addiction ruin you. The people here, we've seen what you're capable of. You're talented, young. You have years ahead of you. We can't let you throw that away for yet another version of the Normandy landings.
I've seen you produce things of genuine brilliance. Games that have made me laugh. Games that have made me cry. And best of all, games that have made me think. You can't get that when you're shooting nazis in the face. There's no reason to limit yourself like this, my friend. There are literally billions of people we could be shooting in the face. Maybe one day we can even make popular, professionally-developed games that don't involve people shooting each other in the face at all.
It makes me worry, too. If you keep portraying nazis as almost cartoonishly-evil caricatures, we risk forgetting all the lessons we should have learnt from their existence. It's the same as people who refer to nazis as 'monsters'. It misses the point. The nazis were people. Nothing more, nothing less. To say that people who perpetrate atrocities aren't people, or are somehow less than human, is to imply that the people you do consider human could never perpetrate atrocities. We know that isn't true. What's more, to suggest that the likes of the Holocaust are only possible when people attain some kind of almost demonic level of evil is to miss that the Holocaust happened in large part due to ordinary people doing evil things without a second thought. The nazis, and all that they brought into the world, were and remain a complex historical phenemenon, which deserves to be understood in order to prevent it happening again. This is, of course, hard to convey when you're just using them as cannon fodder.
Not that I can't see the reasons for doing so. For one thing, the Second World War is not seen as a hugely morally-ambiguous conflict, at least in Europe. Gives the Americans the chance to potray themselves as Big Damn Heroes™ (with a supporting role for us Brits), toppling an evil bastard leading an evil bastard regime. That act hasn't been as successful lately, though. So if you're a developer looking for the opportunity to make a Big Damn Hero™ game, you can either craft a fictional war (difficult) or hijack a real one (easy). So you go looking for wars. Can't use the current unpleasantness, or things like this happen. Can't use Vietnam, because that didn't end so well. Can't use Korea, because neither did that. And to go even further back, you can't use the First World War, because it's depressing. So you're left with Hauptmann Nazistereotype waving back at you.

not, strictly speaking, historically accurate

Not that the cannon-fodder thing matters by now. Nazis are stock characters. One thing I thought was interesting was the different reaction the inclusion of Japanese enemies got in Call Of Duty: World At War. Then again, that post I linked to was very much a dissenting opinion. Most people, I suspect, never gave it a moment's thought. People are very willing to use the 'it's only a game' defence here, and I don't buy it. I think it plays into all the stereotypes of gaming as an immature medium for immature people. The idea being that if it's only a game, it doesn't matter. This happened, too, with N'Gai Croal's take on the Resident Evil 5 racism controversy (don't try and tell me gaming doesn't have a race problem, either).
Games can be more than that. I do believe that games can be art. It's just a question of getting us to the point where a Pathologic can sell as well as a Gears Of War. Gaming industry, in large part this is something you should be doing. And a good start would be checking yourself into nazi-rehab.

* * *

Bloggery-type stuff: Things have been going OK. So OK, in fact, that I have nothing to write about. I think I'm going to write some things about gaming to pass the time. I have two ideas at the moment. I've just finished Prototype, so there's a review of that coming. And I also want to look back at Far Cry 2, perhaps as a means of addressing the racism-in-gaming thing I mentioned here in more detail.

Dear British Electorate

Shame on you.
Kisses,
Alex

A World Of Pain

So last night I watched a documentary called A World Of Pain: Meera Syal on Self-Harm. Let me just refer to my notes (yes, I took notes). My word, I seem to have scrawled the words 'patronising bitch!' down at one point or another. I think that was about a quarter of the way in, after the phrase, 'What makes [self-harmers] cross the line? Could it be something to do with our mental health?'.
I don't mean to suggest, of course, that you shouldn't explain the basics of what self-harm is and why people tend to do it, but when it takes you 15 minutes to get there, and most of those 15 minutes have been talking about Meera Syal, that's probably a bad sign.
I'm not out to do a hatchet job, because I really wanted to like this documentary. It's just a pity how appallingly bad it is. It's an earnest piece of middle-class hand-wringing with no clear idea of what it's talking about and all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the kneecaps. Plus, they actually used Jeff Buckley's cover of 'Hallelujah', which should give a general idea of both the tone and the level of imagination at work here. Also, as I find I have written here, 'The Smiths! Fuck's sake!'.
Anyway, the first bit tries to explain why self-harm is more common these days, what with the impending Mental Health Crisis Doompocalypse Of Death. We have the revelation that teenagers now are perhaps feeling a tiny bit more pressure academically and socially, as well as finding out about Meera's book, Meera's TV adaptation of the book, Meera's birthdate, what Meera's horrible friends think about it, and the wonderfully revealing sentence (as Meera is talking about her adolescence), 'if I had a problem, I just opened Jackie magazine'. Which is nice.
We also touch on why self-harm has become more generally known about, and it turns out it's all Diana's fault: 'since Diana's confession [to having self-harmed], it seems like self-harm has become mainstream [...] I don't remember celebrities displaying their apparent [words cannot do justice to the tone this word is delivered in] self-harm scars like Amy Winehouse'.
Um. Just so we're clear? I didn't start self-harming because of Princess Diana. Or Amy Winehouse. And come to think of it, I don't believe self-harm has become mainstream; the looks I get when I go out in short sleeves would seem to indicate otherwise. And it's not as if self-harm has become more known about because of any larger trends in the spreading of knowledge between now and the 70s, is it? I mean, just imagine if people could find out about things on some kind of interweb thing. It'll never happen, though, so clearly it's all down to the sloane bint.
After all this bollocks Syal finally gets around to talking to actual teenagers, asking them if they know people who self-harm and why it's (apparently) more common. The same sort of reasons come up: competition and the media (Meera plainly does not like this idea). One very eloquent girl mentions the kind of pressure to live up to the sort of social ideal a lot of the media are in the business of perpetuating. I don't recall, but I may have mentioned that in an earlier blog post; it's definitely an argument I can see the merit in, and it's not as if talking about media responsibility is to automatically assume BBC1 is broadcasting subliminal messages telling people to cut themselves.
The film is generally long on empathy and short on actual detail or facts, so it's only a small mercy when we finally get round to seeing someone who has self-harmed talking. About half of that interview is comprised of soft-focus reaction shots of the interviewer. Anyway, this girl talks about self-harm as a choice; a not particularly good coping mechanism, but a coping mechanism nonetheless. Obviously, I have a few bones to pick with that idea, but prior to this the view of self-harm is very much of this Terrible Thing That Is Happening To Our Babies And Must Be Stopped, so it's nice to see some more reasoned views.
Another thing I was going to mention was how unusually specific this film is about self-harmers. First, you pretty much have to be female (takes 57 minutes before anyone even mentions guys who self-harm, and Syal doesn't talk to any). Secondly, you can't really be over 19 (The completely-missing-the-point award of 2009 goes to the phrase 'Self-harm is often associated with angst-ridden teenagers... but sometimes angst-ridden grown-ups do the same').
Continuing the 60-minute guilt trip, we have another quote; 'Who else is at risk? Anyone living outside of a secure family unit...'. As if you can't self-harm if your parents are still playing happy families. Also, those questioning their sexuality, and British Asian women. This is where it gets a bit complicated. I'd like to think there isn't a cultural or ethnic basis for or propensity to self-harm, but it would seem that the numbers don't really back this up. Syal goes into some of the possible reasons why British Asian women are disproportionately likely to self-harm, including a possible lack of independence, the culture clash, and different cultural ideals and expectations of women in Asian culture. I can't really argue with this, mostly because it's not my place to; in terms of my cultural background, I'm from a curiously schizophrenic mix of middle-class social climbing and working-class Catholicism. Half popery and half pot-pourri, if you will. In any case, the logic in this bit seems sound and it was actually interesting, thus making it the highlight of the film.
By this point, we're 38 minutes in and we're just now seeing Meera talk to someone who actually treats self-harm, in the form of a university nurse who looks after students' health, physical or mental. We find out (again) that it's all about Pressure. Which doesn't quite answer the question. If self-harm is more common, which is difficult if not impossible to actually prove, why are more people turning to it specifically instead of other ways to cope with pressure? Are they? None of these questions come up, leaving the whole thing rather superficial. Don't even ask me about prospective answers to the great big self-harm epidemic we apparently have now.

Syal: Why are more adolescents self-harming?
Nurse: ...pressure?
Syal: Oh.
Syal: Well, what can we do about it?
Nurse: You could try actually talking to your kids once in a while.
Syal: Oh.

(Not an actual quote, but it might as well have been)

Then we get on to the mistreatment of self-harmers in A&E, which means that Meera gets to use her guilt-tripping reaction-shot superpowers for good instead of evil. Later a consultant is wheeled out to lie about whether or not it still happens.
Finally we're into the final stretch, and we go to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in South London, where Meera talks to a very articulate and intelligent patient by the name of Louise, about things like harm minimisation and so on. This bit's actually quite good. And that's more or less it. Add a few mopey songs, and a director obsessed with contrails because they look a bit like cuts (lines tend to), and that's A World Of Pain. Watch it if you want to, but don't expect to learn a great deal from it.
To finish up my ranting and moaning about it, I'm going to get all high-and-mighty and talk about how I'd approach making a film about self-harm. First and most importantly, I would talk a hell of a lot more to people who self-harm and people who treat them. Secondly, I would at least try not to bring my misunderstandings and outright stereotypes into it. And thirdly? Thirdly I would never, ever, ever use 'Hallelujah' on the soundtrack.
Last words of advice? Don't take self-harm too seriously*. It's not the end of the world.
Music: Queen - Under Pressure, Los Campesinos! - This Is How You Spell, "HAHAHA, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics"
* Yes, I know I've been guilty of this in the past. Won't stop me lecturing people on it, though, because this is New Media and no-one expects that to be consistent.
I have never laughed so hard at a 'this programme features harrowing images from the start which some viewers may find disturbing' announcement.