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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Netflix’
16.01.2023

Above: I spy Natasha Lyonne and a Plymouth Barracuda. So the car is part of her screen identity? So it should be, it’s television. I might have to watch this.
Two very fascinating responses come up in Wiredâs interview with director Rian Johnson on the Netflix release of his film Glass Onion.
Iâm not going to refer to it with the bit after the colon in the Netflix release because it doesnât make any sense. If youâre that stupid to require its presence, you wonât be able to follow the film anyway. (Johnson was annoyed that it was added as well. I can see why.) The second Peter Ustinov-led Poirot film in 1982 wasnât called Evil under the Sun: a Death on the Nile Mystery. Studios obviously thought we were smarter 40 years ago.
Anyway, the first quotation, on social media trolls, where Johnson believes they have to be shut down, not ignored. Between Wiredâs senior editor Angela Watercutter and Johnson:
Wired: It does feel like a shift. Ewan McGregor issued a statement pretty quick saying that this doesnât represent the fandom. And like you said at WIRED25, 99 percent of the fandom isnât trolls.
Johnson: Well, and also, that 1 percent tries to do this shell game where they say, âAnyone who doesnât like the movie is a racist.â Thatâs a bad faith argument. Itâs so clear. Weâre not talking about whether you like something or whether you donât, we’re talking about whether youâre toxic and abusive online and whether youâre an odious sexist racist.
Just something to keep in mind if you still use Facebook or Twitter, where these sorts of discussions erupt.
Second one, and why I began blogging about the interview: Johnson is working on a TV series called Poker Face for Peacock, with weekly release and stand-alone stories.
Oh, so each episode is a standalone?
It was a hugely conscious choice, and it was something that I had no idea was gonna seem so radical to all the people we were pitching it to. [Laughs] The streaming serialized narrative has just become the gravity of a thousand suns to the point where everyoneâs collective memory has been erased. That was not the mode of storytelling that kept people watching television for the vast history of TV. So it was not only a choice, it was a choice we really had to kind of fight for. It was tough finding a champion in Peacock that was willing to take a bet on it.
All my favourite series follow this format and I was deeply surprised that itâs been gone so long that it seems radical in the early 2020s.
Itâs actually why I tend not to watch much television these days, because all those shows are history.
Who wants multi-episode story arcs? I want an hour of escapism and next week I want another hour and I honestly do not care if character A picks up traits or clues about their fatherâs brotherâs roommateâs missing excalibur each week and its relevance to their superpowers. If the characters are reasonably fleshed out, then Iâll enjoy the standalone stories on their merits, thanks. Maybe give me a little bit of the underlying mystery in the first and last episodes of the season. Or maybe not, I just donât care.
These are the sorts of things I have boxed sets of: The Persuaders, Return of the Saint, The Professionals, The Saint, The New Avengers, Mission: Impossible, UFO, Department S, The Sweeney, Dempsey and Makepeace, Hustle, Alarm fĂźr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei. By the 2000s, I did think it was odd that Hustle was being compared to The Persuaders and how it parodied the formula. What parody? The shows are not that alike. Now I think the writer must have been getting at the standalone nature of its episodes (though there were some that connected through various seasons). It was that unusual by the 2000s for Hustleâs structure to be considered parodic.
As many of you know, I have Life on Mars but only because by then that was the closest thing to the formula, even if Sam Tyler is trying to figure out whatâs happened to him in the background each week. I also have recordings of The Paradise Club, and prefer season 2 to season 1 because of its standalone episodes. I have fond memories of the US shows such as Knight Rider, Automan and CHiPs but never went as far as getting the DVDs.
Johnson is roughly the same age as meâheâs a year youngerâso heâll have grown up with the same influences. His statement that this was how people watched TV for the majority of its history is bang on. Just on that alone, I might find out what Poker Face is about. Maybe we Xers will start getting things weâd like to watch after decades of reality TV and a decade of realty TV, neither of which interests me.
Tags: 1970s, 1980s, 2022, 2023, car, film, history, interview, magazine, Netflix, TV, UK, USA, Wired Posted in culture, interests, TV, UK, USA | No Comments »
14.10.2021
I canât be the only person who does this. This is one of the few things that I do on Facebook. Removing off-Facebook activity is another.

1. Let me check my Facebook advertising preferences. Who has been uploading my private information to Facebook without my permission? Hmm, Ramp, @rampcard, thatâs new. Iâve never heard of you.

2. âThey uploaded or used a list to reach you.â I never gave you my details, so the fact youâre uploading them to a platform I disagree with offends me.
3. Therefore, Iâm going to click âDonât allowâ for both these options. You canât show me ads, and no one can use your list to do so, either. And Iâm just going to click âDonât allowâ for the second option just to limit things more. (The graphic is after Iâve done both.)

4. Just to make sure I never hear from you on this platform, Iâll block your page as well.

There are dozens of companies Iâve had to do this to. Netflix and Spotify were big offenders, but so are some of our government departments. Even places I like and shop with: if I havenât given you permission, then youâve earned yourself a block. I don’t want to hear from you via Facebook or Facebook products. Own goal is the applicable football term here.
Very few T&Cs around the place mention the uploading of private information to Facebook like this. Thereâs usually some mention of the like buttons and what they do, and tracking by Facebook Pixel, but not this.
Tags: 2021, advertising, email, Facebook, Netflix, privacy, social media, Spotify Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | 1 Comment »
07.02.2020
It pays to have some ground rules when dealing with the internet. A very big one that Iâm sure that you all observe is: donât do business with spammers. If a Nigerian prince tells you he has $5 million for you, ignore him.
There are tainted email lists that have been going around for years. I used to have filters for all sorts of permutations of my real address, back in the days when we had a âcatch-allâ email. My address definitely wound up on a South African spammersâ list in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and to this day I get South African spam from some respectable looking companies that took an unethical shortcut in compiling their targets. Thereâs a third where the spammer has confused the âcompanyâ and âfirst nameâ fields that began doing the rounds during the 2010s. All so easy to spot. If they claimed I signed up to their list, and don’t know my first and last names, then there’s a massive clue right there.
This all begs the question of why a company with the size and reputation of Netflix feels the need to resort to such lists. Here’s the fourth one this Gregorian calendar year as they up their frequency of spam:

Netflix spam, shown actual size.
Thereâs a thread online where one netizen was told by Netflix that someone else had signed them up, which is incredibly unlikely, and more likely an excuse to cover oneâs dodgy behaviour.
These began in November 2019 for me. The ‘This message was mailed to [âŚ] by Netflix because you created a Netflix account’ is untrue, and if it were true, how come there is no email confirmation of this account creation in any of my emails from 2019? Surely if you created one, Netflix would confirm your address at the very least? And if they don’t, then that’s pretty poor business practice.
This isnât a phishing attempt, as the links all go to Netflix and itâs come from Netflixâs account with Amazon, who doesnât seem to do much about it. If youâd like to see a similar one, someone has posted it online at samplespam.com/messages/2019-07-20/V801I2196eM554074 but where they have a header line with â00948.EMAIL.REMARKETING_GLOBAL_SERIES_CORE_2_DAY_4.-0005.-5.en.UAâ, mine has â00948.EMAIL.REMARKETING_GLOBAL_SERIES_CORE_2_DAY_4.-0005.-5.en.USâ. (Netflix thinks I live in the US.)
Thereâs no reply on Twitter. Nor was there any reply from this email that I sent to [email protected] last November:

The people they claim are in charge of privacy don’t care about privacy.
I shanât subscribe to Netflix any time soon because of Internet 101. If they don’t care about your privacy now, they’re probably not going to care about it after you’re a customer. In the 2020s, with people more sensitive about it, it’s foolhardy for Netflix to go against the trend. Right now, their email marketing has all the subtlety of a cheap scammerâsâjust with nicer presentation.
Tags: 2019, 2020, Amazon, email, marketing, Netflix, spam, USA Posted in business, internet, marketing, USA | No Comments »
04.02.2018

I came across a thread at Tedium where Christopher Marlow mentions Pandora Mail as an email client that took Eudora as a starting-point, and moved the game forward (e.g. building in Unicode support).
As some of you know, Iâve been searching for an email client to use instead of Eudora (here’s something I wrote six years ago, almost to the day), but worked with the demands of the 2010s. I had feared that Eudora would be totally obsolete by now, in 2018, but for the most part itâs held up; I remember having to upgrade in 2008 from a 1999 version and wondering if I only had about nine years with the new one. Fortunately, itâs survived longer than that.
Brana BujenoviÄâs Pandora Mail easily imported everything from Eudora, including the labels I had for the tables of contents, and the personalities I had, but itâs not 100 per cent perfect, e.g. I canât resize type in my signature file. However, finally Iâve found an email client that does one thing that no other client does: I can resize the inbox and outbox to my liking, and have them next to each other. In the mid-1990s, this was one of Eudoraâs default layouts, and it amazed me that this very efficient way of displaying emails never caught on. I was also heartened to learn from Tedium that Eudora was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniakâs email client of choice (âThe most important thing I use is Eudora, and that’s discontinued’). Iâm in good company.
However, this got me thinking how most users tolerate things, without regard, in my opinion, to whatâs best for them. Itâs the path of least resistance, except going down this path makes life harder for them.
The three-panel layout is de rigueur for email clients todayâall the ones Iâve downloaded and even paid good money for have followed this. Thunderbird, Mailbird, the oddly capitalized eM. All have had wonderful reviews and praise, but none allow you to configure the in- and outbox sizes. Hiriâs CEO says thatâs something theyâre looking at but right now, theyâre not there, either. Twenty-plus years since I began using Eudora and no one has thought of doing this, and putting the power of customization with the user.
But when did this three-panel layout become the standard? I can trace this back to Outlook Express, bundled with Windows in the late 1990s, and, if Iâm not mistaken, with Macs as well. I remember working with Macs and Outlook was standard. I found the layout limiting because you could only see a few emails in the table of contents at any given time, and I usually have hundreds of messages come in. I didnât want to scroll, and in the pre-mouse-wheel environment of the 1990s, neither would you. Yet most people put up with this, and everyone seems to have followed Outlook Expressâs layout since. Itâs a standard, but only one foisted on people who couldnât be bothered thinking about their real requirements. It wasnât efficient, but it was free (or, I should say, the licence fee was included in the purchase of the OS or the computer).
âIt was freeâ is also the reason Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect as the standard word processor of the 1990s, and rivals that followed, such as Libre Office and Open Office, had to make sure that they included Word converters. I could never understand Word and again, my (basic) needs were simple. I wanted a word processor where the fonts and margins would stay as they were set till I told it otherwise. Word could never handle that, and, from what I can tell, still canât. Yet people tolerated Wordâs quirks, its random decisions to change font and margins on you. I shudder to think how many hours were wasted on people editing their documentsâWord canât even handle columns very easily (the trick was usually to type things in a single column, then reformatâso much for a WYSIWYG environment then). I remember using WordPerfect as a layout programme, using its Reveal Codes featureâit was that powerful, even in DOS. Footnoting remains a breeze with WordPerfect. But Word overtook WordPerfect, which went from number one to a tiny, niche player, supported by a few diehards like myself who care about ease of use and efficiency. Computers, to me, are tools that should be practical, and of course the UI should look good, because that aids practicality. Neither Outlook nor Word are efficient. On a similar note I always found Quattro Pro superior to Excel.
With Mac OS X going to 64-bit programs and ending support for 32-bit there isnât much choice out there; Iâve encountered Mac Eudora users who are running out of options; and WordPerfect hasnât been updated for Mac users for years. To a large degree this answers why the Windows environment remains my choice for office work, with Mac and Linux supporting OSs. Someone who comes up with a Unicode-supporting word processor that has the ease of use of WordPerfect could be on to something.
Then you begin thinking what else we put up with. I find people readily forget or forgive the bugs on Facebook, for example. I remember one Twitter conversation where a netizen claimed I encountered more Facebook bugs than anyone else. I highly doubt that, because her statement is down to short or unreliable memories. I seem to recall she claimed she had never experienced an outageâwhen in fact everyone on the planet did, and it was widely reported in the media at the time. My regular complaints about Facebook are to do with how the website fails to get the basics right after so many years. Few, Iâm willing to bet, will remember that no oneâs wall updated on January 1, 2012 if you lived east of the US Pacific time zone, because the staff at Facebook hadnât figured out that different time zones existed. So we already know people put up with websites commonly that fail them; and we also know that privacy invasions donât concern hundreds of millions, maybe even thousands of millions, of people, and the default settings are “good enough”.
Keyboards wider than 40 cm are bad for you as you reach unnecessarily far for the mouse, yet most people tolerate 46 cm unless theyâre using their laptops. Does this also explain the prevalence of Toyota Camrys, which one friend suggested was the car you bought if you wanted to âtell everyone you had given up on lifeâ? It probably does explain the prevalence of automatic-transmission vehicles out there: when I polled my friends, the automaticâmanual divide was 50â50, with many in the manual camp saying, âBut I own an automatic, because I had no choice.â If I didnât have the luxury of a âspare carâ, then I may well have wound up with something less than satisfactoryâbut I wasnât going to part with tens of thousands of dollars and be pissed off each time I got behind the wheel. We donât demand, or we donât make our voices heard, so we get what vendors decide we want.
Equally, you can ask why many media buyers always buy with the same magazines, not because it did their clients any good, but because they were safe bets that wouldnât get them into trouble with conservative bosses. Maybe the path of least resistance might also explain why in many democracies, we wind up with two main parties that attract the most votersâspurred by convention which even some media buy into. (This also plays into mayoral elections!)
Often we have ourselves to blame when we put up with inferior products, because we havenât demanded anything better, or we donât know anything better exists, or simply told people what weâd be happiest with. Or that the search for that product costs us in time and effort. Pandora has had, as far as I can fathom, no press coverage (partly, Brana tells me, by design, as they donât want to deal with the traffic just yet; itâs understandable since there are hosting costs involved, and heâd have to pay for it should it get very popular).
About the only place where we have been discerning seems to be television consumption. So many people subscribe to cable, satellite, Amazon Prime, or Netflix, and in so doing, support some excellent programming. Perhaps that is ultimately our priority as a species. Weâre happy to be entertainedâand that explains those of us who invest time in social networking, too. Anything for that hit of positivity, or that escapism as we let our minds drift.
Tags: 2018, advertising, Amazon, Apple, Apple Macintosh, business, car, computing, design, email, Eudora, Facebook, keyboards, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Netflix, office, Pandora Mail, politics, product design, productivity, publishing, social media, social networking, software, Toyota, TV, user interface, WordPerfect Posted in business, cars, culture, design, internet, politics, publishing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
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