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I don’t know if I like this. I need to see the whole episode… the characters seem down-pat, for what they should be, and I like the art and animation, but I can’t tell if the old-school vibe is a put-on or homage…
Via Warren Ellis, you should read this. Warning: some comic, television, and Quantum of Solace/Bond spoilers.
So Andi has me watching reruns of Almost Live!, an comedy show that ran locally in Seattle from the 1980s to the 1990s. It’s got some famous alumni, like Joel McHale, who is now The Soup on E!. This bit kills me. May be not be as funny to folks not living in or from Seattle:
Did we REALLY need to see Gina Yellin by hologram? I mean, really?
Their coverage so far of the election is blowing CNN’s away. They’re even running results with commercials boxed off so you can see them during most of the commercials.
Should I go see if anyone is waving an American flag on Fox News?
Never forget:
The campaign may be officially over. No, really. This is made of awesome.
If you don’t know what Spaghetti Cat is, spread the word. We saw it first on The Soup, which we’re addicted to:
Spaghetti Cat would not leave, however:
Thanks to Bernie for this link to brentevans.blogspot.com, which details the fate of just about every current major television show due to the ongoing WGA work stoppage.
From Adrian Pasdar’s YouTube…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV1dPAOZguM
I’ve been amazingly lame this October, in not updating the site so much. I think after actually keeping up with it, I’d simply gotten burned out on keeping up with it. This is pretty normal for me, though, with going at the site in waves. I’ll pick it back up in frequency soon, I’m sure. Winters are always more interesting, and October has been a generally quiet month anyway. Nothing major to report, good or bad, it’s just been a happily sleepy month more or less.
The only thing I really have to report is that we saw in Target last night that there is a MacGyver box set now, that includes all seven seasons and all the TV movies in one collection. 111 hours of Richard Dean Anderson’s hair and Swiss Army Knife.
I need to buy it.
Oh man, this is hot: NBC has attached director Doug Liman to helm a two-hour pilot for a revamped Knight Rider. The goal is to make the show a “Transformers-inspired reworking” of the role that The Hoff made famous.
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No, it’s not that old Picard Rap. It’s Patrick Stewart… going all soft-shoe on the Enterpise bridge. Hot.
Adama for President by Xaotica, on Flickr. Found I presume somewhere in Seattle:
Good story on computer forensics and open source tools used.
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I noticed today that I was getting a ton of hits (by my standards, a ton) for an image of Hayden Panettiere, who plays Claire Bennett on Heroes. I couldn’t figure out where on Earth they were all coming from, until I just ran a Google Images search for her, which you can see here. As of now it still shows my site as the last entry on the first page. The funny thing is, until this post, I never had a picture of Hayden or Claire on this site. I do have my Livejournal Image Randomizer, which links off of each page, and on the top right of each page loads the most recent image on each reload. It’s not really technically random–Livejournal publishes an RSS feed of all the images linked inline on every recent LJ post, and the PHP scripts I borrowed and tweaked from other sites just trawls the last 1 or 10 entries, depending on where I use it.
Anyway, this is the page on my site that they were ending up on from Google Images. It’s specifically this page, the June 29, 2006 archive, in case that long Google URL goes dead. The actual picture of Hayden was probably linked from the Livejournal feed at the exact moment that Google crawled that page, and voila! People are coming looking for hottie pictures of Claire and find me grumbling about holes in socks, and my review of Superman Returns. This is the picture they were after…
Two of the coolest guys in the world, Sir Richard Branson and Stephen Colbert, apparently poured water on each other’s heads in an unfriendly manner during a television segment taping that will likely never air.
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The Internets also reports: “Everyone loves Google. They want to be everything to everyone, and they’re getting pretty damn good at it. Once you start using their services it gets easier and easier to migrate more of your life to them. But there’s a slight problem. Google, like any other legitimate service provider, encrypts login traffic, but not your content…”
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NBC News got clowned at DefCon, Slashdot just reported:
“Dateline NBC allegedly attempted to infiltrate the DefCon hackerfest with a producer using a hidden camera. The show hoped to tape hackers admitting to illegal activities, but DefCon got wind of the plot and displayed the would-be-mole’s photo before every presentation. Dateline refused to deny the planned infiltration. ‘ All journalists covering DefCon sign an agreement upon registering for the conference that outlines the rules, but the DefCon organizers say the mole apparently registered as a regular attendee, thereby bypassing the legal agreement. Dateline NBC is best known for its controversial To Catch A Predator series, which uses hidden cameras to tape men who are allegedly seeking to have sex with minors they met online.”
Serves them right.
“DefCon staff lured her to a large hall telling her that the Spot the Fed contest was in session and that she could get a picture of an undercover federal agent at the contest. When she sat down, Jeff Moss, DefCon’s founder, announced that they were changing the game. Instead of Spot the Fed, they were going to play Spot the Undercover Reporter and then announced, “And there’s one in here right now.” Madigan, realizing she’d been had, jumped from her seat and bolted out the door with reporters carrying cameras chasing after her through the parking lot and to her car.”
Andi and I finally finished watching Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica before leaving for our trip. Holy God. Everyone at work had been chastising me for not keeping current–we had episodes from MARCH stored in our Tivo–and boy, were they ever right. From what happened to Kara, through the trial, through everything, that is some fantastic science fiction and good old fashioned drama. I seriously can’t wait for the final season, and I officially have no idea or clue where it’s going now.
I just thought of something huge for my Heroes predictions, and revised my last post to add this.
New prediction: I can’t believe this didn’t occur to me sooner. Early on in the season, Peter struggled to control his abilities. I think Claude training him later was a red herring. Sylar, when he first met Peter in Texas, had already killed Charlie, the waitress with the super intellegience, and the ability to immediately grasp and understand… anything. Peter in turn began to very, very rapidly acclimate to his powers after Sylar left him for dead. Coincidence? I think not. Sylar’s stolen ability to de-atomize matter is going to be a huge factor as well, I think–they’ve played up that one trivial power quite heavily. When Peter flies Sylar up into the sky to contain the blast, he’ll use that on him.
I’ve been thinking alot about how Season #1 of HEROES is going to end. My below predictions can be complete crap, but I stand by them as complete crap. Probable spoilers ahead, so STOP reading and don’t blame me.
Prediction #1: I’m beginning to think that Sylar is going to end up killing Ted soon, stealing his radioactivity powers. Peter–when he uses a new power–seems incredibly, instinctually adept right out of the box.
Prediction #2: Sylar, on the other hand, does not, and seems to at times struggles to learn how to use his stolen powers. Peter gains the gift plus understanding–Sylar seems to just gain the gift. Sylar also, you’ll note–never uses two powers at once that we’ve seen. Peter seems to easily do this. Sylar will be unable to handle Ted’s power, which he himself can only barely handle.
Prediction #3: “Save the cheerleader, save the world,” i.e., meet the cheerleader, gain the power (Peter) to save the world.
Prediction #4: Claire’s regeneration will be the tipping point in the season finale battle with Sylar, where I predict Sylar will be about to go Hiroshima, and Hiro will be forced to stop time to prevent it. Exploding Sylar will be in Manhatten–but someone has to get him out, and Hiro we’ve seen has to go with the teleported person. He’d die. Nathan can fly Sylar out–but would die. Peter can fly out Sylar–and survive, thanks to Claire.
Prediction #5: Early on in the season, Peter struggled to control his abilities. I think Claude training him later was a red herring. Sylar, when he first met Peter in Texas, had already killed Charlie, the waitress with the super intellegience, and the ability to immediately grasp and understand… anything. Peter in turn began to very, very rapidly acclimate to his powers after Sylar left him for dead. Coincidence? I think not. Sylar’s stolen ability to de-atomize matter is going to be a huge factor as well, I think–they’ve played up that one trivial power quite heavily. When Peter flies Sylar up into the sky to contain the blast, he’ll use that on him.
Prediction #6: A cliff-hanger of a burning, half-atomized Peter Petrelli falling to Earth from low orbit…
Update 3/10/07: Added prediction #5.
Unsurprisingly, we’ve been watching Heroes on NBC since it’s pilot aired originally last year. Surprisingly, we weren’t completely sold on the show at first. Why? The pilot, relative to what the rest of the first season, was by far the worst episode. Not even weakest–television shows, if they maintain a strong, religious following, and keep growing, can overcome a weak pilot sometimes. Of course, to everyone else I’ve spoken to, they’ve generally loved the Heroes pilot. For us, it was a case of being cynical old school comic book readers. Every single thing touched on pretty much in the pilot episode we’d seen before, multiple times. Not just that, but we’d seen it done exceptionally. Well. So-so. Poorly. We’ve been reading comic books for our entire lives.
Then something occurred to us. Comic book readers, especially people that actually study them somewhat, and actually read comic book scripts, and follow it as a form of art and literature, and not just a diversion, or hobby, or casual reading, are an extreme minority. We really are. We are, in relative terms, comic book snobs. We’ve read our Watchmen, and our Dark Knight Returns, and our Sandman, and our old large-volume reprints of classics like the original Bob Kane Batman stories, and our Amazing Fantasy #15. We gleefully pointed at the deconstruction of the form when it happened in Planetary. We’re elitist snobs (although I do love my Ultimate Spider-Man, still). We’d seen all this “crap” before. But 99% percent of the America–no, the world’s population–never had.
It was all new to them.
We came back next week, and the week after, and are now sixteen episodes into Heroes. Each week is fantastic. Each week shows growth for nearly all the characters involved, and their stories. Even better? Heroes, in many ways, is the antithesis of LOST. LOST goes out of it’s way to give you questions, but only the most (if at all) roundabout answers. LOST is like crack cocaine: a great high, but you feel rotten and dependent immediately. It’s Las Vegas; all flash and the illusion of substance like a mirage. I’ve heard that LOST is allegedly now “halfway done” and has a finite five year plan, so maybe that will be changing. But it is what it is. Heroes, on the other hand, is like the American heartland, or the ideal of it: all meat, all solid, whole-wheat, and pure story. Even better? Like I said, it’s all new to most people, but many of the themes to seasoned comic book readers will seem familiar since… oh, the 1960s or 1970s. That said, Heroes is one of the most amazing live-action interpretations of comic book superheroes (albeit without spandex) I’ve yet seen. In that, the show is on par with the Tobey McGuire Spider-Man films.
To my knowledge, very little has happened or come about yet in Heroes Season One that hasn’t either served the larger plot, a given character’s story, or been a set-up for one or the other. Watching Heroes is actually a lot like watching one of my favorite films, Ghostbusters. Go back and look at that film, and it’s best aspect, the brilliant script. Nothing happens in that movie, no action, no line of dialogue, no joke, that isn’t a setup for a plot point or something else. Everything builds into something else until the crescendo of the closing credits. That’s what the entire season of Heroes feels like (so far). The last episode, where we see one character suddenly flaunting a heaping host of abilities (at one point more than one at a time!) was just fantastic, and felt like the ending of act four of a five act story. The season so far, also rather interestingly, has more of the feel of a mini-series, than a regular week-by-week show, which has 18-20 stand alone episodes per season and then one larger series mythology aspect in the remaining episodes. All of Heroes is the mythology; every episode is a chapter of the larger story.
That’s what makes that show so fantastic: it’s all meat, with none of the vapor that other shows use to pad and fill out their allocation of episodes per season.
So Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report last night implored viewers to vandalize Wikipedia in special ways, because they could. Specifically, he said to screw with environmentalists and spread the word that the number of elephants in recent years has tripled. Sure enough, Wikipedia editors who saw this coming locked a bunch of articles, so it was contained. If I have a couple minutes I try to be helpful and use a special bookmark for new edits by random, anonymous users. Flagrant vandals that I see I just roll back. I figure what the hell, 30 minutes of my time each day in five minute blocks is worth it for the enjoyment I get out of the site in payment. Anyway, I catch this smart ass. He adds “The number of elephant men in recent years has tripled.” to the Joseph Merrick article. lol.
