Despite the Trainspottings and Shaun of the Deads (Shauns of the Dead?) of this world, there’s still a belief that Brits ultimately have two choices when creating a new film:

• Period drama with politeness and kings.
• Slightly implausible comedy, written (by law) by Richard Curtis.

To that end, it’s great to see indies continuing to do decidedly un-British movies. Upcoming is Joe Cornish’s sci-fi comedy Attack The Block (Empire, trailer), where aliens rather stupidly decide to invade our planet by way of South London estates.

The trailer looks pretty good (despite its penchant for hateful teal and orange colour-grading), but it could yet fall foul of American stupidity. According to Dark Horizons, US execs are considering subtitling the film, because of those tricky South London accents. As if a good chunk of Americans don’t already have an excuse to not watch the film (it not being American), subtitling it will surely keep people away in droves.

Still, this entire story, while sad, doesn’t shock me. I remember seeing a US backlash to Shaun of the Dead, with people—without irony—complaining about the ‘difficult’ accents, including Simon Pegg’s. Frankly, if you’re from the USA and you can’t decipher Simon Pegg’s accent, you’re pretty much fucked when it comes to watching films and TV shows from the UK. Hell, you’re probably pretty much fucked understanding anyone from outside of your town or immediate family.

Oh, stunning. Over on Develop, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has spewed shit from his mouth in the form of words, splattering them all over the internet. He says Nintendo will embrace the independent developer, but “draws the line” with less-established garage outfits:

[Nintendo will] separate out the true independent developer versus the hobbyist.

Where we’ve drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that’s not a business we want to pursue.

Fuck you, Reggie. If ever I needed proof that Nintendo had utterly lost it regarding gaming, this is it. ‘Garage’ indies are the lifeblood of the industry—they always were. Hell, when the industry first started, tiny indies were pretty much it—those single coders who created innovative, exciting new product again and again.

In the modern age, there is a hell of a lot of crap on iOS, but to tar all hobbyists with the same brush is pretty much like saying “but we want to continue sucking up to majors, because they all do wonderful games, every time”. In other words, it’s bullshit.

Some home coders create the most wonderful games imaginable, free from the fury of focus groups. They are one person’s vision, not one person’s vision smashed to pieces by the so-called realities of modern videogame production, which forces games into neat little pre-packaged boxes. On iOS, many of the very best games have been created by home coders—hobbyists—holding down other jobs. Some of these guys have then gone on to become what our chum Reggie would call a “true independent developer”, but they’ve only been able to do so due to the App Store not drawing arbitrary lines in the sand of the kind Nintendo’s enforcing.

Still, you keep on going, Nintendo. Keep on releasing a new console every few years, supporting it with loads of great games for a few months, then reverting to getting people to buy new hardware (Look! This one’s ORANGE! And this one vaguely resembles the packaging of a game we put out in 1987!) rather than concentrating on games. You eschew the smaller indies that could make your hardware great. You continue on your downward slope, because, despite being a huge Nintendo fan for years, your attitude towards ‘garage’ developers makes me sick.

Johnny Davis in the Guardian:

The “i” in iMac was supposed to stand for “internet”, but the first models had no slot drives – users had no way of burning their own CDs or DVDs. Given that almost 30m PCs were sold with this capability during 2000, Apple had missed a trick.

Really? REALLY? Having been woken this morning at 6 a.m. by the army seemingly blowing up the local countryside, I’m pretty fucking tired (and, frankly, more than a little grumpy). But even if I’d not slept all night and had instead spent the night drinking a combination of whisky and more whisky, I’d have not made the error Davis does above. Hell, even a 12-year-old copying bits of Wikipedia would not have made that error, assuming they could read and parse basic information.

This leads me to the following reasoning. Pick one or more from:

• Johnny Davis can write but, sadly, cannot research/read.
• Johnny Davis drinks far too much whisky before writing articles.
• Johnny Davis, like so many people writing about tech these days, doesn’t understand enough about what he’s writing about.
• Johnny Davis frankly doesn’t give a fuck, and the Guardian subs can’t be arsed to do basic fact-checking.
• And the get-out-clause for Johnny Davis (because I’m feeling generous): one of the Guardian’s subs needs beating to death with a trowel and/or a surprisingly weighty 1990s Mac laptop.

Still, I am tired, so maybe I’m misremembering and was totally hallucinating the optical drives in the original iMac (which were tray-based rather than slot-loading, and yes, a lack of burning, but GET YOUR GENERAL FACTS RIGHT IF YOU’RE CONCOCTING AN ARGUMENT), and the fact the only ‘missing’ drive was the dead-in-the-water floppy. Yes, that must be it. After all, someone paid large sums of cash to write for a national newspaper wouldn’t get such utterly basic facts wrong, would they?

Electronista recently went into a fap-fest regarding Samsung’s new OMG IPOD TOUCH KILLER, rattling off facts about its ability to support Flash, expandable storage, lack of sync app requirement, and neatly glossing over the lack of a ship date, price and battery life. Marco Arment expertly rips the piece to shreds on his blog. A highlight, reacting to the Electronista piece’s asertion that Samsung has “presented some of the first significant competition to the iPod touch”:

I’d call it ‘potential competition’—it’s not competition if it doesn’t exist yet. And when it does, it’s not really a competitor if it doesn’t sell very well. It’d be difficult to say, for instance, that the Zune was ever really providing ‘significant competition’ to the iPod.

This should be printed out and stapled to the head of every idiot tech journo who dares to, without irony, use the words ‘iPod touch’ followed by ‘killer’ in any article even mentioning the Galaxy Player.

(For the record, I want there to be loads of challengers to the iPod touch—only then will Apple’s arse be kicked, perhaps encouraging the company to weld a decent stills camera to the thing. For now, though, such a thing simply doesn’t exist.)

The BBC asks Can HMV reinvent itself? The famous entertainment group, founded nearly a century ago, is currently, to put it bluntly, fucked. Its stock-market value is now under £50m and the banks are circling like hungrier, angrier, uglier versions of vultures, waiting for HMV to keel over so that they can strip its corpse for money meat.

The BBC gets one thing very wrong, though, when it argues why HMV’s gotten such a serious kicking of late:

Apple—with its iPod and iPad—is the silent white assassin of HMV, because more and more of us are choosing to download music, games and films, rather than buying those silvery discs. And Waterstone’s is being squeezed as we opt to download books on to so-called tablets.

The real assassin of HMV wasn’t silent and it certainly wasn’t Apple. Instead, it was Amazon, blundering into the UK, setting fire to the concept of ‘profit margins’ and undercutting every high-street retailer to the level that it made no sense to buy in a store. Instead, HMV rapidly became a kind of gigantic shop window, where you’d check out stuff you’d like to buy, before returning home and grabbing it from Amazon.

Where HMV then failed was in creating its own online offering that didn’t respond to Amazon (and also the likes of Play.com) competitively. HMV was comprehensively outmanoeuvred on price, and it for far too long welded hefty postage costs to its products.

The one smart move the group has made is in its 50 per cent purchase of 7digital, which may be dwarfed by iTunes but is nonetheless a highly respected online music store, with lucrative deals with Spotify and BlackBerry. But whether this is enough to convince the banks to hold fire is debatable—and that isn’t down to Apple, but HMV in continually reacting after the event, rather than presciently noting which way markets are heading in.