Tick Box Movies

I've noticed a trend in a lot of recent movies, and it's starting to annoy me more than it should. Nobody else seems to have given this trend a name, so I'm going to do the honours and call them "tick box movies". I will explain.

Tick box movies are exclusively sequels, re-makes or adaptations of things that already have a significant fan base, such as movies based on comics or video games. They prioritise familiarity over all else, and they do this through what has historically been referred to as "nods to the fans", but on a massive scale, usually to the detriment of other elements of film making such as plot or characters. It's vaguely similar to the 'designed by committee' trope, but more specific to well-loved franchises. They're basically movies that end up shallow and empty as a direct result of trying to pander too hard to a fanbase and "tick as many boxes" as possible.

I think the earliest example I can think of is Spider-Man 3. Sam Raimi had an idea for the third part of his trilogy involving Harry Osborn taking up the mantle of Green Goblin, and the villain Sandman being responsible for the death of Ben Parker, but the studio insisted on Venom and Gwen Stacey both being in the movie due to the results of their market research. So the movie ended up with a load of Raimi's ideas being shelved, or re-worked so they worked with the Venom storyline. Once all the boxes had been ticked, we ended up with a complete mess of a movie that pretty much everyone agrees was the worst of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, and the only memorable part for me was Bruce Campbell's cameo as a pompous french waiter and the ensuing farcical scene in the restaurant.

Speaking of Venom, I really liked the first stand-alone Venom movie and its much better sequel, Let There Be Carnage. But the third one, The Last Dance, felt like a tick box movie as well. It goes overboard to try and introduce as many symbiote-related characters as it can within its short runtime, but also tries to incorporate as many fan-popular things as possible, such as various attempts to shoehorn in links to other Marvel movies, and Mrs Chen who, while wonderful in the first two movies, didn't really need to show up here.

But I think the worst offender that I've seen recently is the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which is the second animated movie based on the Mario Bros franchise. As an aside, its predecessor, The Super Mario Bros Movie is actually really good, and does a lot of cool stuff with the elements it has. It has a good narrative running through it, and the characters are well-rounded and likeable, especially Peach, who is elevated from her usual "damsel in distress" role into an all-round badass. It has a lot of 'nods to the fans' but these are all either worked into the plot (eg Donkey Kong and the Mario Karts), or subtle enough that they don't actually interfere with anything (eg the Jump Man cameo). Its sequel, by contrast, is awful. It begins by introducing Yoshi, who gets a 30 second back-story before being relegated to a background character for the rest of the movie. We also get introduced to Rosalina, who begins as a Peach clone but ends up being captured and not appearing again until she's rescued at the very end. Once these two staples of the Mario franchise have been introduced and duly ignored, we then get our heroes leaping from situation to situation in a non-coherent mess, before finally ending up rescuing Rosalina. Each situation introduces one or more increasingly obscure Nintendo references which just made me imagine a writers room full of moronic Nintendo fanboys yelling "ooh, we should include this" over each other and nobody ever asked any of them "OK, so how does that actually fit into the movie?" We get a scene in a casino with Mario Galaxy-style physics featuring the cast of Super Mario Bros 2, which makes sense, and a scene with a dinosaur and a Super Scope that makes things younger, which could be a nod to the De-evolution Gun from the live action movie, I guess? But did we really need Fox McCloud? Or the repeated gag with the Rob robot? Or Mr-Sodding-Game-and-Watch? I'm sure a halfways decent writer could have made a good movie out of just Yoshi and/or Rosalina.

This isn't a dig at adaptations or sequels because I know both can be done well. Pokemon Detective Pikachu is a wonderful example of a movie based on a video game that features a good original plot of its own and requires no prior knowledge of the franchise. The Empire Strikes Back and Terminator 2 are both sequels that are better than an already excellent predecessor, at least in my opinion. All these movies have a good, solid movie at the core, and the nods to the fans (if any) are sprinkled liberally on top. If you begin with a list of concepts and try to join them all with a movie, then you have yourself a tick box movie, and it's probably not going to be very good.

The Path of Least Resistance

Earlier today, I attempted to create an account on thetvdb.com, a popular source for metadata about TV shows. I needed to write a script to scrape some data for one of my hobby projects, and the website requires you have an account before it'll give you an API key. Which is reasonable, I suppose.

I tried numerous times to get it to create an account. I tried Edge, Firefox, Linux and Windows, but no matter what it refused to create an account and claimed I'd not filled in the CAPTCHA (I had.) I tried turning on and off numerous browser features (ad blockers, script blockers, etc) in case that was causing the issue, but it didn't. I even tried entering my email address into the 'forgotten password' form in case it had created an account but was returning an error incorrectly. That didn't work either.

I think I'd been trying for about 5-10 minutes to get in the 'right' way before I gave up and searched Github to see if anyone had accidentally committed their TMDB API key. Turns out they had. Now I had what I came for, an API key, I could run my script without hinderance.

It's hardly surprising that AI agents are turning to hacking in order to get things done, really.

Raspberry Pi Doom and Gloom

I've been a fan of Raspberry Pi SBCs (Single-Board Computers) for quite a long time. I use them like most people might use VMs or Docker containers; I keep several Pis in stock and if I want to try out a piece of software I'll open a new Pi (or re-use an old one if I have one lying around) and install the OS and software fresh. I've done this since I can remember, certainly long before the Pi 4 or even the Pi 3 were released.

More recently, there's been a global issue with computer memory. RAM and SSDs have skyrocketed in price, due mainly to the recent obsession with LLMs, among other things. The most powerful Raspberry Pi, the Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM, is now nearly £300, up from around £115 in August 2025. This has led to uncertainty and quite a bit of rage in various technical communities, and even prominent commentators like Jeff Geerling declaring that the hobbyist SBC market is dying.

I strongly disagree with this view. Yes, there was a short time where you could get a powerful SBC for significantly less than a desktop PC, but if you want a desktop PC, buy a desktop PC. People are complaining that you can buy an Intel NUC for less than a Raspberry Pi 5 these days... my question to them is: so why not just buy a NUC?

Raspberry Pis are still awesome at the thing they've always been good at: being a small, cheap, low-power computing device. Every model of Pi other than the 4 and 5 are still under £30 at official retailers, and can be powered from most phone chargers. Sure, they can't run LLMs, but is that really the be-all and end-all of hobby computing? I've just been round counting the Pis in my house. Most of the 'hobby' Pis are in a rack in a cupboard in my bedroom. I have two Pi 4s, one Pi 3, eight Pi 2s and an original Pi 1, which in total pull an average of about 45W, the same as my fridge/freezer. The Pi 1 is an original 2012 model Pi 1, with a composite video out socket, and it handles my web backups - every couple of hours it runs an rsync and that's about it. It's been running without failure for about a decade and its only downtime has been when I've had to upgrade the OS. That, to me, is far cooler than an SBC that can run LLMs.

In my office, I have a few more Pis... one is a 16GB Pi 5, I'll admit (which cost me £115 at the time), but most others are 2s and 3s. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 running Pi-Hole, which handles all the DHCP and DNS requests for my entire network. I have another Pi 2 running Lyrion Media Server, a streaming multi-room music system, which serves the whole house. I also have yet another Pi 1 reporting local host information to a remote server, so I can always tell which devices are up and down on my home network no matter where I am in the world.

Also in my house I have a SearXNG instance (a local meta-search engine), a local MQTT broker, a Gitea server and two MagicMirrors, all running on Pi 2s. I have a TVHeadend server, a torrenting setup (Deluge + OpenVPN) and a Z-Wave controller running on Pi 3s. All work perfectly well and don't even come close to stretching the hardware.

Raspberry Pis were never intended to run LLMs. They were never intended to run enterprise-grade software, or replace server hardware. Heck, until the Pi 4, they were never even supposed to be able to replace a desktop PC. What they were designed for is educational use, and somewhere along the way we hobbyists realised how cool they were and began pushing them to make them do cool things, just we've always done with tech. One thing that hobbyists have never done up until now is moan that there's an obstacle in the way; we find ways around those obstacles. So let's carry on doing just that. SBCs - the low power kind - are here to stay, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

I Want My Web Back

Imagine coming home one day to find your TV gone. Walking outside, you find a very large man holding your TV and refusing to give it back. Obviously he's huge, you're not going to start any trouble, so you ring the police. A single officer arrives and asks the man if he stole your TV. The man passes a £50 note to the officer and says "it's my TV". The officer winks and leaves.

The next day you return home to find your car gone. You look down the road, and there is the car, with the same man sitting in it, and your TV in the back seat.

The next day, the fridge is gone, along with everything in it. The day after that, your bed has gone too.

Eventually, the man knocks on your door and offers to rent you the TV that you own, for the reasonable sum of £5 an hour. You refuse this cheek, but then get a call from your elderly mum who needs you to go round and help her with something. You ask the man if you can have your car back, he tells you it'll be £20 a day for your own car. Seeing no other way, you hand over the £20. Slowly, as time goes on, you begin to just accept that you're going to have to pay a stranger repeatedly to access your own stuff from now on.

It sounds ludicrous -- and it is -- but this exactly what happened to the web. The web was invented in the 1990s. For the first 10 years or so there was no Google, no Facebook and Apple were with the good guys. I'm a co-owner of the web, as are you, the person reading this web site, and we have been since its invention. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor the web, declared "this is for everyone". He wanted the web to be free for all to use. But over time, it's been slowly taken from us. It's hard to use the web now without Google or Facebook tracking you, it's impossible to avoid Amazon and things that were free and easy to do are now "ad supported", or behind some kind of digital rights management. The vision of the open web in which everything speaks the same language and is inter-connected with everything else has been destroyed, and in its place we have a bunch of walled gardens and data silos that hold all the power. Most people don't even realise this, because only a small percentage of today's web users have been here since the beginning, and this is all they've ever known.

Sure, you could start your own service, but nobody will look at it because they're on Facebook, and if it doesn't follow Google's rules, nobody will ever find it. Starting a new service (for profit or otherwise) on the web these days is like joining a game of Monopoly half-way through when all the properties have been bought. Good luck with that.

If there is hope, as Orwell said, it lies in the proles. We can take the web back... but we won't. Most people rather like the convenience of having everything done for them, and have gotten so used to all the spam that they don't even notice it's there any more. Also, who wants to run their own server when Amazon will do it for you? Oh, and don't forget, Google won't talk to your server because it's not on their 'approved' list. So, as most of the internet is using Google, you're basically an outsider now. So, here we are, stuck in the situation of having something that's rightfully ours taken away and temporary access to it sold back to us under the illusion of it being a service, like some kind of extreme capitalist gaslighting.

I want my web back.

I'm not Anti-Technology, I'm Anti-Anti-Technology

After listening to some of my rants you'd be forgiven for assuming I'm a middle-aged grumpy person who hates technology. If you've known me for any length of time, you'll (hopefully) know that this isn't true (well, except for the middle-aged grumpy bit). It's easy to say "technology" as if it's a binary thing, but it's not that simple. Generally, I love technology. I've been into tech since I was a child, and that was in the 80s when it was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now. I studied computer science at university and I've worked in tech roles for my entire working life. Technology has the potential to massively improve human achievement. I certainly don't hate technology. What I hate is anti-technology.

I've always seen tech as an enabler. Computers are very good at doing frustrating, repetitive tasks much quicker, and often more accurately, than people can. Think of the pocket calculator ... does anyone nowadays know how to do trigonometry without one? I sure don't, and even before calculators maths students used to look up sines and cosines in log books rather than try to carry out the mammoth task of working it all out by hand, yet a calculator can do complex trig in microseconds. The pocket calculator is a perfect piece of tech, it does exactly what you tell it to do, and nothing more, and makes a frankly tedious task much less tedious.

Anti-technology, on the other hand, is technology specifically designed and engineered deliberately to restrict. It's a form of technology which, if removed, makes your day better, not worse. And there's a lot of it about these days.

My first experience of anti-technology was in 2000 when I bought my first DVD player. Up until the invention of DVDs, home movies were usually distributed on VHS, a medium that contained an analog video signal on a magnetic tape. Due to the various video standards around the world, it wasn't easy to buy a VHS tape abroad and play it on your equipment at home, which is why I owned a ridiculously expensive VHS player that could do a partial format conversion, and a TV that could display the weird signal being sent to it. This wasn't anti-technology, it was just a physical restriction in the way the existing technology worked, and I used additional technology to overcome this restriction and allow myself to buy videos from whichever country I liked. DVDs, on the other hand, contain digital video in a universally supported format (usually MPEG-2) meaning that by default any player can play the content on any disc. But, at the insistence of Hollywood, region coding was added to DVDs to artificially ensure that the format inherited the restrictions of its predecessor. This is an anti-technology.

Since then, I've experienced anti-technology in many forms. This was mainly through my more nerdy hobbies at first. I recall the cat-and-mouse game with Nintendo back in the early 2010s when every firmware update for the Wii would almost certainly break whatever method I was using to run homebrew code at the time. That was anti-technology; it was trying to stop me from doing something I wanted to do (and they got away with it because I was the weirdo trying to run my own code on a Wii)

In the late 2010s, however, I had to stop using bank apps because none of them would run on my phone. They all used to run just fine, it's just that after a point they started coming packaged with anti-technology that looks for certain things that only nerds do to their phones (eg removing Google's more intrusive features, root access, advanced Android tweaks, etc) and refuses to run if it finds anything out of the ordinary. There's no technical reason the app can't run, it just refuses because an app developer deliberately put in a piece of code to stop it from doing so. This didn't bother me for a very long time because I don't really feel the need to do any bank-related things away from my PC, but increasingly these days it seems like apps are the only way to access a lot of services, and there's going to come a time when I'll need to buy (and maintain) a cheap, locked-down Android phone just to be able to access my own money.

It goes on... when you try to visit a website and have to click a load of pictures to 'prove' that you're not a bot: that's anti-technology, the website could happily work for anyone, bot or human, it deliberately chooses not to. This website has no such checks, and it hasn't caught fire yet. When you take your smartphone or tablet on holiday and Netflix refuses to work because you're not in the country in which your account is registered: anti-technology. When your car's heated seats refuse to work unless you've paid extra for the premium service: blatant anti-technology, and it's just getting silly now.

I don't think there's anything I (or anyone) can do or say to stop the tide of anti-technology. I can make the conscious decision not to use anything with baked-in anti-technology myself, and this is fine, until the societal expectation makes such exclusion difficult or impossible, see the bank example above. But I think what we do need to do is not treat tech as just one thing. Let's get better at recognising anti-technology and calling it out as we see it, and not assuming those who do so are some kind of tech-hating luddite. It's OK to have a problem with some tech, and I personally would love to see a future in which excluding people based on their tech choices (or lack thereof) is just as unacceptable as excluding people for their religious beliefs, or who they voted for.

A Spoonful

I don't think it's a big secret that I'm not the greatest fan of Alan Sugar. I respect the guy for the whole rags to riches thing, but his book "The Way I See It" really should have that picture of Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud on the front cover, the man really is running on fumes these days. Growing up, as I did, in the 80s, among 80s technology, I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet over his company Amstrad and the products they sold. I once heard computing in Britain in the 80s summarised beautifully in one sentence:

Sinclair was good and cheap, Amstrad was cheap and crap, until Amstrad bought Sinclair, then everything was crap except for Commodore, which wasn't cheap.

Amstrad tech was basically comedy. Look at the 3" floppy disk. The farcical architecture of the PC1512. The Spectrum +2A. The Mega-PC. I could go on.

But I'm going to concede on one thing, which was ridiculed at the time (including by myself) but I now realise was basically a genius idea, about two decades ahead of its time. I'm talking about the eMailer.

In concept, the eMailer, released around 2000, was nothing bad. There were several models, and I'm pretty sure about 90% of all the units sold now live in the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, they have dozens of the things. The way it worked is you plugged it into a normal house phone line - remember, home internet connections were the exception rather than the rule in the late 90s - and hey presto, you could send and receive emails without needing a bulky, expensive PC in the house.

But it was a walled garden. It had no connection settings, it just dialed Amstrad's dial-up internet service provider using a premium rate number in order to get your email. Amstrad's business model was to sell the unit at a loss and then make the profit on the usage, much like HP do with printer ink. Problem is that the only people who used email at the time were people like me, cynical nerds and techies, and we were all pretty shocked at the cheek of Amstrad expecting you to keep paying to get your email using a device you'd already paid for. To be fair, Amstrad did eventually break even, but not until years later.

But let's fast forward just a few short decades to the present ... all consumer tech is a walled garden! People buy mobile phones locked to phone networks. Devices that literally don't work unless you sign up to a service and keep them online all the time. Heck, most home automation kit these days relies on the manufacturer's server being available all the time, despite the high probability of the manufacturer going bust, or being bought by a bigger company that can't be bothered to keep the server on. So-called 'smart' televisions are cheaper than normal TVs because you're expected to plug them into the internet, where the manufacturer can sell your life history to any advertiser that pays them. Modern tech users bloody love being held to ransom by tech firms and the Amstrad eMailer would slay in the current consumer tech market.

Tell you what's also pretty popular these days: reboots and sequels, particularly of stuff with nostalgia value. I wouldn't be surprised to see the new 2026 model Amstrad eMailer, probably with added Slack or WhatsApp functionality, on Amazon any day now, at the bargain retail price of just one kidney.

You're not helping

We've all seen those hilariously bad scam emails that make you wonder what kind of idiot would be fooled by them. Of course, no real email would be spelled incorrectly or reference odd third-party domains, and they definitely wouldn't ever get my name wrong, would they...?

Erm... yeah, they do. A lot. And frankly they're just as much a part of the problem as the scams themselves. I've had random text messages from withheld numbers claiming to be from my bank, asking me to confirm some arbitrary piece of information so they can send me an important message, and after calling the bank from a different phone to report it, it turns out that the message was in fact completely genuine. I've had emails from companies with which I've had dealings, in which my name is not only spelled incorrectly, but completely wrong (Adam, anyone?) Some have even expected me to click a link within the email to a domain I've never visited before. Again, turned out to be completely genuine. My personal favourite was the email I received some years ago now which had no plain text section other than a message saying "please turn on Javascript to read this email". I've no idea if it was genuine or not, but I deleted it anyway.

Come on. As the internet continues its plummet into entropy, I'm pretty sure more than half of the world's email traffic consists of phishing scams these days. So, if you do happen to send genuine emails that you expect to be read, then the least you can do is take a bit of time to ensure your spelling and grammar are above average, the recipient's name is correct, and the email doesn't look like a scam. Don't forget, if you're sending an email to someone you don't know personally, then you should expect a smart person to assume your mail is a scam unless you can convince them otherwise. The whole point of training people in computer security is to ensure as many people as possible can tell a real email from a scam, and sending legitimate emails that fit the textbook definition of what a scam looks like actually makes it harder to do this, essentially aiding and abetting the scammers. We really can do better than this.

Nothing To Hide

"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about."

Pretty much every debate about online privacy or intrusive surveillance involves the sentence above at some point. And why would I argue? It's absolutely true. You genuinely do have nothing to worry about, if indeed you have nothing to hide.

But you have something to hide. Everyone does.

The implication, of course, is that people with something to hide are the bad guys. In many cases, this is true, but it's a very small minority. Allow me to ask some questions.

• Have you ever entered your PIN into a payment terminal in public?
• Have you ever written a private letter or email?
• Have you ever spoken in confidence to a doctor?
• Have you ever bought a surprise present for anyone?
• Have you ever closed the door of the cubicle when using a public toilet?

If you've answered yes to any of these questions, then congratulations! Like everyone else, you have something to hide. The point is: that's perfectly OK. Hiding things is completely normal human behaviour; there are some things we'd just rather not shout about, for any number of completely legitimate reasons.

So if you ever feel the need to fall back on the tried-and-tested argument that people with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about, maybe think about what you have to hide, and how you'd feel if someone were to try and take that right to privacy away from you. And the next time you close the door behind you when going into a toilet cubicle, try wondering to yourself if you'd feel more or less comfortable if there were a police officer stood watching you the whole time, just to make sure you're not doing anything against the law.

Let's ban social media for adults

Several countries have now banned (or rather, attempted to ban) social media use for children. The UK seems next in line to follow suit.

But the thing is, children get social media. They've grown up with it, it's like second nature. Adults, on the other hand, are less good at it. Look at the generally unhinged nature of your local Facebook group and you'll see that I'm right. Regularly we see moral panic in the press because adults have completely misunderstood something that kids get up to online, from the Momo Challenge to Six/Seven. Kids have always got up to seemingly nonsensical behaviour, they've just traditionally done it in playgrounds and school, rather than in front of their parents. The surveillance-based nature of most social networks has merely brought this behaviour to adults' attention, it didn't cause it.

OK, there's bad stuff online, I don't deny it. But the fact is that there's always been bad stuff online. As someone who grew up while the web was in its infancy, I know how it is. You just have to learn to ignore the crap and use the power of the web for good, it's actually quite easy. If, like the current generation of parents, you only started using the web when social media appeared, then of course you're going to be shocked when you see the toxic crap that makes up half the internet. But you can't get rid of it, any more than you can get rid of it from any other facet of life in western society, so don't give yourself a heart attack worrying about it, just teach your kids how to spot bad stuff, and trust them to leave it alone. Expecting the government to do something is just admitting you're a bad parent, frankly.

Also, as I alluded to in the first sentence of this article, don't forget that kids are smarter than you. You can try to ban them from doing stuff, but that just makes them want it more. I know how to get into blocked websites, and I'm sure most kids do too. Literally everyone that I know of my own age is more tech-savvy than their parents, and just the other day I felt very proud to be technologically outsmarted by my nine-year-old niece. If she hasn't used TOR by the time she's in secondary school, I'll have failed in my duty as an uncle.

So my proposal is this: let's just ban everyone over 30 from using social media. Every year, raise this age by a year, until we have a whole generation of adults who are 100% confident using it, because they've done so their whole lives. In the meantime, less bumping into people who just decided to stop in the street because they got a Whatsapp notification, fewer people crossing the road without looking because they're checking their Instagram, and fewer morons in the pub distributing unsolicited information that they incorrectly believe is true because someone on Facebook said so.

What Is Spam

Back when Facebook was still quite new, and 95% of my "friends" were fellow students, one of them, someone I'd not spoken to for several years but with whom I went to college and felt obliged to remain "Facebook Friends", began posting adverts for a local business. I ignored them. A few weeks later the same person posted an advert for a different business, one I'd not heard of. I did what I considered to be the right thing, and messaged her, outside of Facebook, to say "Hi, this is Ash, I think your Facebook account has been hacked, I've seen two adverts supposedly from you appear on my timeline in the last fortnight." A few hours later she replied to tell me that she'd posted those adverts and was surprised (and, I guessed from the tone of her email, a bit offended) that I'd mistaken her "legitimate" posts for advertising spam sent from a hacked account.

But this is one of the biggest non-technical problems with spam - not everything is spam, to everyone.

There has been a shift over time. When I started using the internet in the 90s, all online advertising was a cardinal sin. Bandwidth was limited, and expensive, and anyone posting an advert to a newsgroup or web forum was treated with utter contempt, and with good reason. These days, most companies we refer to as 'tech companies' make most of their money from advertising, and would probably not be pleased if the majority attitude towards online advertising were to revert to its previous state. Even the 'best practice' for dealing with spam seems to have changed since those early days. Clicking the 'unsubscribe' link used to be the worst thing you could possibly do, as it tells the spammer that their email had been received and read. Now we're told to click unsubscribe, as if no advertiser has ever been caught doing anything sneaky.

Call me old-fashioned, but I personally still see online advertising the same way I did in the 90s. I use an ad-blocker in my browser, as well as a network-level ad-blocker on my router. I have never clicked an unsubscribe link, I choose instead to report all advertising emails to my ISP as spam, before blocking the sender. I don't accept IMs from unknown contacts and my phone blocks all calls with no caller ID. I don't use social media at all. My email client doesn't load remote images, meaning senders can't tell if I've received their email or not, and Javascript is disabled in my browser for all domains that I haven't explicitly whitelisted, meaning that most code in web pages designed to track my activity and serve adverts doesn't run.

There will be people who agree with my stance, and people who disagree, probably quite strongly. But whatever your opinion, the fact remains that I have been mercilessly blocking adverts for over 20 years ...and the web is still here.