Hey, speaking of old video and VCR effects, here’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done on “Saturday Night Live,” “Body Fuzion:”
The best part (apart from the music) is how Drew Barrymore looks like she can’t deliver a line without cracking up. Also: “Penthels!”
Body Fuzion
Short-term Nostalgia
A few weeks ago, I was at a party, doing what I usually do at parties — looking for a way to work the Sam & Max games into the conversation.
Talk turned to Adobe After Effects and all the cool stuff the kids can do with video editing, and I mentioned the “Behind the Bad” videos Nick and Jake made to promote the Strong Bad games, and that got me going on about all the Sam & Max Season Two trailers. A friend mentioned he’d never seen any of them, so I said I’d put them up on the blog but then forgot.
Earlier I said that the trailer to “Moai Better Blues” was my favorite of the videos, but that was a lie because the one for “What’s New, Beelzebub?” is:
But “Moai Better Blues” is my second favorite.
And then “Night of the Raving Dead”, which was a good bit more disturbing before they added the blurring:
Also good is “Ice Station Santa” (“Ice Station Santa”), especially if you’ve seen the inspiration.
“Ice Station Santa.”
And also “Chariots of the Dogs”, which has references to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” so it’s cool if you’re over 30, and I think this is the one that made Nick start switching to video:
(And they’re all available on the Telltale Videos site for your workday browsing and procrastinating needs).
Fat Man and Little Boy and Jughead
After watching this week’s episode of “Lost” (called “Jughead”), I think I’ve finally figured out the secret of the island: it loves killing unnamed people. If I were a Flight 815 survivor at this point, I’d be going around to everyone who would listen, introducing myself and giving a little bit of my backstory. And then, most likely, stepping on a land mine.
I was really impressed; I thought this was just a great, solid episode. It wasn’t full-to-bursting with shocking revelations, but it broke two cardinal rules of “Lost:”
- Stuff happens.
- That stuff is worked into the story.
Usually, reveals in “Lost” consist of 30 minutes or so of people running purposelessly around the jungle and then everything stops and the music crescendos and then there’s The Big Reveal suddenly followed by a bunch of violins then a cut to black with that sound effect like a bookcase falling over at the end of a long concert hall.
But this one found a way to tell an episode-long story, and mention big stuff throughout, almost casually. Big stuff like (spoilers):
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A Disquiet Follows My Mid-Season Break
Or, “We Never Said They Had a Good Plan.”
So last week was the big return of “Battlestar Galactica” (with “Sometimes a Great Notion”) after months of speculation after a huge cliffhanger and the promise that all our questions would be answered. I didn’t really say anything about it at the time, because I was waiting for the second episode to see if I was just disappointed in the anti-climax, or if the series had finally lost me.
After this week’s (“A Disquiet Follows My Soul”), I’m inclined to think they lost me. The problem is basically that now, I can see the strings, and my suspension of disbelief is completely blown. I think Rain nailed it when she blamed it on lazy screenwriting, although I’d say it’s only half laziness/lack of inspiration, but also clumsy self-importance.
From the start, the series has prided itself on being mature and “edgy,” but at least through the miniseries and the first couple of seasons, it earned that reputation. Now it just seems like self-parody at best, or self-delusion at worst. It’s the “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” style edgy; no thought behind it, just “what’s going to shock people?” It’s catering to the type of people who say things like, “Even at its worst, it’s still better than most of what’s on television,” ignoring the fact that television is getting better, and these days shows like “Knight Rider” are the exception, not the rule.
The big reveal of Earth we’ve been building up to? Look how happy they are and psyche! it’s a wasteland! Suck on that, complacent middle American TV watchers! Following the story of a basically sweet, hopeful character? Blam, suicide! Did you jump? Huh? Did you? And now we’ll blow your mind with the reveal of the Final Cylon! Are you astounde— okay, yeah, we didn’t really expect you to be all that excited about that, frankly. It’s a series of cheap shots, and not particularly clever ones at that.
And what’s got me convinced it’s a long-term downturn and not just a couple of not-particularly-inspired decisions, or a couple of episodes that are “off,” is this interview with Ron Moore that basically confirms these writing decisions are just that arbitrary. Not necessarily what makes sense as far as a series-long dramatic arc, but what’s going to go for the quick surprise or the cheap shock or, more often, the “dark” angle. Because we all know that “dark” means “smart.”
I’m still going to watch the final eight episodes, obviously, since I’ve come this far. But I’ve pretty much given up hope that they’re going to pull off a satisfying ending. Even without the cheap semi-adolescent plotting gimmicks, there doesn’t seem to be any solid season-wide pacing, or any weight to the big reveals. Why did they go to the trouble of bringing back Lucy Lawless’s character just to throw it away? Why is the fact that 2000-year-old Cylons were found on Earth just mentioned once and never repeated? Why does Starbuck’s discovery just result in a lot of clumsy scenes designed to look cool, instead of any notion of a real plot development? Is this “BSG” or “Heroes?”
SPOILER: Caesar dies
This weekend I finished watching the last episodes of the HBO series “Rome.” It’s been a hard road to the end of the series: it was recommended by a friend on here, but it took me a long time to get into it. And they nearly lost me a few times in season 2, because at times it seems relentlessly bleak and the characters are all doomed to misery. But the series does an amazing job of pulling everything together by the end, and it’s just an outstanding example of what episodic television is capable of.
Warning about “spoilers” on this show is as goofy as warning about spoilers for Titanic, but the series does invent stories for some characters and takes liberties with the stories of others, so be forewarned if you want to watch the series with every single surprise intact. One of the best aspects of the series is how it manages to put a personal spin on all the historical events — even though you know what’s going to happen, it makes you want to find out how it happens, and specifically how it affects the characters.
But the greatest thing about the series, and the thing that makes me want to write about it at length instead of just saying “Rome is pretty cool, you should check it out,” is the way it manipulates the audience’s sympathies. I was extremely pleased with the ending of the final episode — it’s not exactly a happy ending, but an extremely satisfying one — but it’s not the ending I would’ve expected. The events are basically historically accurate, but I never would’ve expected to be rooting for some characters and plotting the downfall of others.
As is appropriate for a series with so much political maneuvering, your loyalties and sympathies are constantly changing. But it’s handled so much more deftly than the twists of a soap opera or the inertia-driven characters of any other long-running series. Over time, your mindset shifts from a contemporary one to an ancient Roman one: you start to expect betrayals, to see the value of “honor,” and to despise weakness.
There are few if any “good” characters in the series — Marcus Agrippa probably comes the closest, and it’s not long before he manages to piss you off. Cicero goes from being an annoying but shrewd politician to being the most venal and despicable character in the series, even though he’s doing pretty much the same things throughout; it’s your perception of good and evil that shifts. The transformation is most dramatic with Servilia, who begins as a basically noble and sympathetic figure, but by the second season couldn’t die soon enough to satisfy me. In a series where all the characters are scheming and duplicitous, it takes a lot of skill to keep the audience’s sympathy, or shift a character subtly enough that they transform from subtly evil to completely evil.
And the best example of that is the best character of the series, Polly Walker as Atia. I’m still amazed that they could take a character like this one — so relentlessly, unapologetically cruel and manipulative — and make it so by the end of the series, you’re cheering her on. As the story nears the end, you find yourself feeling sorry for her. Considering that the show is trying to cover years of history in two hours, not to mention its own version of Antony and Cleopatra, it would’ve probably been good enough just to leave her character arc at that: the villain who gets her just rewards at the end. But she has a brilliant final scene in which she’s telling someone off, the exact same behavior that earlier in the series had you booing and hissing, but here is nothing but a moment of victory. It’s such a well-written character and such a great performance.
I’m still not sure I have the constitution for these HBO series, because they can get so relentlessly bleak. I had to give up on The Sopranos not because of the violence, but because the characters kept making such stupid decisions that I’d gotten just as frustrated and alienated with them as I would in real life. Rome has plenty of violence and gore and nudity and sex (as any good HBO series should, much less one about ancient Rome), but what’s genuinely mature about it is how effectively it manipulates your notion of heroes and villains.
(Incidentally, if you decide to check out the series, it helps to do a little basic research first, if your memory of Roman history is as rusty as mine was. A lot of the major battles are just briefly mentioned, because the series usually chooses to focus on how the battles affect the characters instead of showing the fight scenes themselves. In particular, knowing/remembering the outcome of the Battle of Actium is important to getting the full impact of the final episode. The DVDs have some excellent documentaries in the special features, which give more of that historical background, but they also are full of “spoilers” for some of the more personal stores and events specific to this series.)
(Also: watching the documentaries reveals that Timothy Van Patten of “Master Ninja” fame was one of the directors on the series. Which is a huge draw for any MST3k fan who also likes to watch people in togas having sex or stabbing each other or both.)
(And finally: SPOILER: Brutus did it.)
Density Calls
The “Lost” season 5 premiered with a two-parter, “Because You Left,” and “The Lie.” You can tell that they’ve finally mastered the “Lost” formula because they aired two full hours jam-packed with over a dozen characters, eight or nine locations all over the world, multiple flashbacks, a genuinely surprising reveal of a familiar character, multiple shoot-outs and double-crosses, and at least three extremely cool action sequences (including flaming arrows!), and still nothing happened.
I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to point out that they’ve decided to go all-in with the time travel angle, especially since Desmond’s back-story and the Dharma Initiative orientation movie for “The Orchid” pretty much said it outright. I am extremely disappointed, though, that they didn’t include an appearance by Bubblegum Tate or any of the other Space Globetrotters.
I guess it’s unfair to say that “nothing happened,” since they at least laid the groundwork for answering a lot of questions, without actually answering those questions. And those questions, as far as I can make out (including spoilers, so don’t read the rest until you’ve seen the episodes), are:
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On the Air
About two months ago, I did the unthinkable and cancelled my satellite TV service. It was both an attempt to save money as well as a social re-engineering project on myself: I’d gotten so dependent on having live TV that it never even occurred to me I could go without it. It was an essential utility, like power and water (and now: broadband internet).
Results so far have been pretty disappointing. Not because it’s been torture, but because there’s been pretty much no change at all. I’m not saving money yet, because I somehow convinced myself to buy an Apple TV, and it’ll be another couple weeks before it “pays for itself.” And I’m not able to take pride in “roughing it” because I haven’t had to go without. There’s just too many ways to get TV programming these days; it’s ruined any feeling of frontier spirit.
- Most of the stuff I want to watch is available through the Apple TV, so I’ve already bought all my season passes (using a Christmas gift) and have them downloaded 24 hours after the show originally airs.
- For the “Battlestar Galactica” premiere the other night, lots of blogs were threatening to spoil The Big Secrets for everyone, so I went onto scifi.com and watched it at my computer without incident.
- For stuff that airs frequently, like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” I can watch it on hulu.com if at all. I installed Boxee on my Apple TV, so I can watch it on the television instead of hunched over in front of a computer.
- All the other stuff I used to spend “dead time” watching — uninteresting documentaries on the Food Network or the History Channel; the sublimely ludicrous “Ghost Hunters;” “MythBusters” and Samantha Brown travel specials which are still fine but lost their appeal from overexposure — I just haven’t watched and haven’t missed.
- Now that you can stream Netflix movies over the Xbox 360, it’s like having an infinite number of channels showing crappy movies I don’t really feel like watching, at any time of the day.
If I were still working at home, I think cable or satellite would be justified. I just spent the last five days stuck in my apartment with a cold, and things were getting pretty dire by the end there. I ended up buying the entire season of “Psych,” one episode at a time, just to have something to watch. (Not that it’s a bad show, just that I never saw myself as a season owner). But apart from that, it’s been pretty painless.
Except…
- They don’t secure music rights for re-broadcasting “Saturday Night Live,” apparently, so they can only sell “selected sketches” on iTunes, or via hulu.com, without the musical guests and without any sketches that use existing music. Even with that, it’s unpredictable when it’s going to become available; the Neil Patrick Harris and Rosario Dawson episodes still aren’t on iTunes, and Dawson’s monologue isn’t up on hulu.com.
- The implementation of boxee on the Apple TV (it’s still in alpha) is pretty nice, but not quite all there yet. I can’t reliably fast-forward or rewind through the stream, so as soon as I sit down I’m stuck watching the whole thing. And if my connection goes south during the stream, I’ve never been able to get it to resume. There’s few things more annoying than having the connection crap out five minutes from the end of a 45-minute-long show, and realizing there’s no alternative except to start over from the beginning.
- I’ve yet to find a source for the magic Saturday Nights on the local Japanese channel, when they air bizarre game shows and sitcoms. I miss watching the I.Q. Supplement and knowing the entire time that there were more constructive things I could be doing.
- And it’s a small thing, but I miss turning the TV onto something while I’m eating dinner. Eating in a silent apartment is just creepy.
So as an experiment, I picked up one of those indoor HD antennas. They’ve been warning us incessantly that the switch to all-digital broadcasting was imminent, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I’m not sure what I expected — actually, that’s not true. I expected it to be like analog TV, but with a bigger picture. There’d still be some ghosting and blurriness and occasional static, to remind you that you were too cheap to pony up for a cable or satellite bill.
This is not the case. Over-the-air HD broadcasts are eerily sharp. (And most are broadcast with 5.1 surround sound as well). It’s exactly the same as the local channels over satellite, but without my having to pay Rupert Murdoch 80 bucks a month. And there’s like thirty channels available, at least twenty of them in English. It could be just because I live in the shadow of Sutro Tower, but everything I wanted came in astonishingly clear.
Except, of course, for the two channels that started the whole experiment: the closest NBC affiliate in San Jose, and the local channel that broadcasts Fuji TV on weekends. It’d be relatively painless to invest in the outdoor version of the indoor antenna that I have now; I’d be surprised if that doesn’t give me better results (assuming I feel like climbing up to the roof to install it). The alternative is to wait and see if the situation improves after the Great Digital Transition of February 2009. Or, be true to the spirit of the whole experiment in the first place, and just go without “Saturday Night Live.”
But what continues to surprise me about the whole business is just how readily available all this stuff is; you don’t have to go without unless you choose to. Having broadcast TV feels like it breaks the spirit of the arrangement, somehow, but I can’t say I’m all that upset since I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for it. What I’ve wanted for years from cable and satellite companies was a real a la carte system, where you pay only for what you want to watch and ignore the rest. I’d always assumed that that was never going to happen, but as it turns out, it’s been available for a while now, and I’m just now getting caught up.
Team Possible
I wanted to say congratulations to my friends at Disney Imagineering for completing the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure at Epcot in Orlando. The attraction went into “soft opening”/preview mode last week, and everything I’ve seen online says that it’s a big hit so far. One of the quotes from this article about the attraction says, “It’s like a modern day Tiki Room, but on a grander scale — I think Walt himself would get a real kick out of this attraction.”
It’s a great concept, and it sounds like they made all the right decisions when making it permanent after the playtest. Now I’ve got to find some time to make it down to Florida and try it out for myself. And encourage them to install a version of it at Disneyland.
iTunes–
Apparently, at some point today (while I was sick in bed waiting and hoping for death to come), Apple announced that it was switching its iTunes store music tracks to DRM-free versions.
Fair enough, but nothing special: Amazon has been selling DRM-free MP3 downloads for a while now. And I switched to Amazon about a year ago, partly because of an exceptionally good example of customer service, but mostly because they sell standard, unlocked MP3 files with no strings attached.
Now, I don’t have any major problem with DRM in principle, as long as it’s done reasonably. As somebody whose livelihood is based on digital downloads at the moment — and who’s seen his work being distributed on torrent sites, even though the pricing structure and availability of legal versions couldn’t be more reasonable — I recognize the importance of making sure people are compensated for their work. One of the reasons I had to stop reading Boing Boing was because of the rabid and sanctimonious anti-DRM sentiment, and the glee they seem to take at the sight of people breaking end-user legal agreements.
Plus, from a purely practical standpoint, I’m just barely inconvenienced by it. I’m a model Apple customer with all the pre-requisite Apple-branded hardware, and they’ve kept the licensing reasonable enough that I hardly ever run into problems. So it’s not onerous, but still: if there’s the option of a locked or an unlocked version at the same price (or lower) and the same level of convenience, I’ll take the unlocked one.
Here’s the problem: before Amazon opened up its service, I downloaded quite a bit from iTunes music store. Apple offers a “special offer” to “upgrade my library” to the DRM free versions, for 30 cents a song, or 30% of the album price. When I last checked, it would cost me over $100 to upgrade my entire library, and the figure keeps going up as they update more of their database. If it sounds like I’ve bought an obscene amount of stuff from iTunes, that’s because: a) that’s over the course of several years; and b) I’ve bought an obscene amount of stuff from iTunes.
But you can only “upgrade” your entire library, not individual tracks or albums. And even worse: that includes everything you’ve ever bought from the iTunes store, regardless of whether it’s still in your library. Over four years, I can get a lot of stupid stuff — albums I’m not sure why I bought in the first place, songs I wanted to hear at 2 in the morning but never want to hear again, stuff that seemed like it’d be good but turned out otherwise, and just plain lapses in judgement for which I have no excuse. Most of those got deleted long ago, and they’re not missed. But I’d get to pay to download them again if I ever wanted to go “iTunes Plus” for the stuff I still like.
Or, buy them again from Amazon and end up paying less overall or more per track. Which is the confusing part: it seems like it’d be in Apple’s best interest to get some more money out of me, instead of insisting on $100 or nothing.
But as I said, the DRM stuff is no more inconvenient to me today than it was yesterday, so there’s no compelling reason to “upgrade” at all. And it’s not as if re-buying music is a totally alien concept: most of the stuff I got off iTunes in the first place was from albums I’d already bought in college and had to sell back for textbooks or food. So in the end, it’s just another example of weird business practices by Apple. And another weird side effect of living during a cross-over from one type of media to another. (Expect to hear me complaining more loudly once all the video content starts going DRM-free).
iList
Because I’m in a year-end list-making mood, and I’ve got insomnia, here’s a handy list of my favorite iPhone apps. All links go to the App Store page on iTunes, so don’t be alarmed.
Tweetie
iPhone client for twitter.com
This is the best twitter client for any platform, as far as I’m concerned. I bought a copy of Twitterriffic and don’t regret it, and I’m still using the desktop version on my other machines. But this is one case where the “less is more” philosophy doesn’t quite hold up. Tweetie lets you separate messages into replies and direct messages, search for keywords and on more general “trends,” and most useful: examine profile details. Seeing who’s following you (and who’s following them, and so on) is the best way to build up a network of people you don’t know.
Speaking of people you don’t know: I never saw the appeal of twitter initially, but now I’ve become one of those annoying types who says it’s “indispensable.” My favorite of the people I don’t know that I’m following is Joshua Green Allen, or @fireland, who’s so funny it kind of pisses me off.
Stanza
Free e-book reader
I don’t understand this one at all; it came out almost as soon as the app store opened, it’s completely full-featured and works perfectly, and it’s still free. You can download books from within the app, directly to the phone, or you can add your own. I haven’t tried reading a full-length novel on it yet, but at least for reading short fiction, it’s perfect.
NetNewsWire
Free RSS feed reader
This is especially useful if you use NetNewsWire as your desktop RSS feed reader (as you should, if you use a Mac), since it keeps your read/unread count in sync with the desktop version. The author updates the app frequently, and he’s always looking for ways to make it faster, simpler, and easier to use.
Air Sharing
File transfer and viewing utility
This lets you copy files directly to the iPhone, without going through iTunes or a desktop client app. It contains viewers for most common file types like video, audio, and iWork/MS Office documents.
SimCity
City-building game
This is a surprisingly full-featured port of SimCity; it doesn’t feel like they had to sacrifice much to get it to work on a phone. It’s roughly “SimCity 2800,” since it’s got the art assets and most of the concepts of SimCity 3000, but not quite the entire game (no subways, for instance). Seeing as how SimCity 3K is the only game that I’ve spent literally an entire day playing, this could be dangerous — luckily, the game drains the iPhone’s battery pretty quickly, and doesn’t scale that well to huge cities.
Now Playing
Free browser for movie showtimes and reviews
Kotoba!
Free Japanese/English dictionary
Works best if you enable the Japanese keyboard(s) via Settings->General->International->Keyboards.
Instapaper
Free & Paid versions, saves web pages for offline reading
Simple and easy to use, works perfectly even in the free version. Great for plane flights.
OmniFocus
Task management software
This one is overpriced and a little over-complicated, but it’s the best one available for the phone right now. The UI just plain works like it’s supposed to, and it turns out to be the fastest and easiest at entering new tasks (which is what you do most often) and sorting them into different contexts. It’s very hard to justify paying $20 for a to-do list app (and much, much more than that if you want to sync your list with the desktop!) but if it’s something you use a lot, it’s the best you can buy.
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