Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
Mike messaged me on iChat this evening after getting back from watching Star Wars Episode III. Our conversation ended up touching on most, if not all, of the points I’ve had wandering around in my head and was planning on using for a more in-depth review than the one I gave previously. So, with his permission, I’m reposting our conversation here.
Spoilers abound, of course, so if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t click through to the full entry…
Dori’s got a very handy list of this year’s Sci-Fi and Fantasy films that are likely to be potential Hugo Award nominees. Some I’ve seen, most I’ve heard of, but there were a few listed that I didn’t know about — including a new Terry Gilliam film!
…I started thinking about the sheer number of F & SF films that will be/have been released in 2005, and thereby eligible for the 2006 Hugo awards (yes, we’ll be there, and yes, we’ll be voting). Here’s the list I’ve come up with:
- 18 February: Constantine (trailer)
- 11 March: Robots (trailer)
- 1 April: Sin City (trailer)
- 29 April: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (trailer)
- 19 May: Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (trailer)
- 10 June: Howl’s Moving Castle (trailer)
- 15 June: Batman Begins (trailer)
- 17 June: War of the Worlds (trailer)
- 8 July: Fantastic Four (trailer)
- 15 July: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (trailer)
- 22 July: The Island (trailer)
- 29 July: Night Watch (trailer)
- 29 July: Sky High
- 29 July: The Brothers Grimm
- 2 September: A Sound of Thunder
- 22 September: Aeon Flux
- 23 September: Corpse Bride (trailer)
- 30 September: Serenity (trailer)
- 18 November: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (trailer)
- 23 November: Zathura (trailer)
- 9 December: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (trailer)
- 14 December: King Kong
Note that this isn’t a list of all the genre films that are being released this year, just a list of those that I suspect have a fanbase that will want their movie nominated. Given that only five can make the cut, it’s going to be difficult. If I missed your fave, or I misunderstood the rules (I’m not quite sure how foreign films fit), let me know.
Lots of interesting looking stuff showing up in the next six months or so. Going over that list, I…
Not a bad lineup at all, from the looks of it.
There’s a lot of rumbling in the Mac world today thanks to a Wall Street Journal article reporting rumors of Apple talking to Intel about using their chips.
Apple Computer Inc. has been in talks that could lead to a decision soon to use Intel Corp. chips in its Macintosh computer line, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The report, citing two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies, said Apple will agree to use Intel chips.
Neither company would confirm the report and an Apple spokeswoman told the Journal she would characterize it as “rumor and speculation.”
This, of course, has led to the usual fooferal about whether Apple may be looking at either moving away from the Power PC chip and onto X86 chips, or possibly simply releasing a version of Mac OS X for Intel processors.
Personally, I think a few of the Slashdot crowd have a better grasp of what’s probably going on here.
/ASCII: My guess is they really are planning on using Intel chips – just not processors. Remember, Intel produces wireless chips, Flash memory, Ethernet chips, and Salt and Vinegar chips.
Halo1: The gigabit ethernet chip in my old G4/400 in fact is an Intel chip.
arloguthrie: Most notably, the XServe Raid runs on an Intel processor. There are tons of reasons Apple would be meeting with Intel. One day, perhaps “the news” will actually be news and not gossip based on “a friend-of-a-friend told me…”
(via /. and many other sites this morning…)
I’ve got to get to bed soon, but first off, while it’s all still fresh in my mind…
…finally.
That was worth watching.
In brief and spoiler-free: I know Episode I stank, and Episode II was better, but still nowhere near what we’d all been hoping for. Episode III, while not perfect (it definitely still has its kludgy moments), is far better than either of the prior two prequels, and — believe it or not — stands as a worthy addition to the series.
I’ll come back and expand on this later, I think — I’d actually love to now, but it’s edging close to 2am, and I’ve got to work tomorrow — but at the moment, I’m just happy to have walked out of a new Star Wars film that I actually enjoyed.
“Main Title” by London Symphony Orchestra, The/Williams, John from the album Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology (1977, 5:25).
Looking at the Google AdSense for Feeds announcement, Scoble takes a moment to rank the various basic types of feeds that can be produced now:
Here, let’s rank RSS feeds from worst (least useful for readers) to best.
- Worst: headline only feeds with ads.
- Almost worst: partial text feeds with ads.
- Barely passable: partial text feeds without ads.
- Better: Full text feeds with ads.
- Best: Full text feeds with no ads.
I’ll only subscribe to the bottom three kinds of feeds and if your content isn’t really “must read” (the New York Times, for instance) then you better stick with the bottom two.
Again, when I subscribe to an RSS feed that means I want a long-term relationship. Think about what that means. How abusive of me do you want to be? On the readership side we get to decide how much abuse we’ll put up with. You might find that your readers won’t put up with much. In which case you’ll have to decide if a few extra bucks is worth a decreased readership.
Dead-on, I’d say.
The first two — ‘worst’ and ‘almost worst’ — would guarantee that I would stop reading that site if that were all they offered. At that point, I’d feel that I’m being treated as a consumer, rather than a reader.
I’ve got a few ‘barely passable’ feeds in my newsreader, but I try to make them as rare as possible. If I try to subscribe to a site and the default feed is partial-text, the first thing I’ll do is peek into the source code to see if I can find a full-text feed. Even if I do subscribe to a partial-text feed, those sites get far less readership from me than others do, as it’s rare that the provided summaries catch my interest enough to bring me to the site.
(And a quick aside here — if you’re determined to do a partial-text feed, would you at least take a moment to actually write summaries for your posts that the feed can use? The default “first 20 words” snippet is virtually pointless. Give me a reason to read everything you write, don’t just assume that I’ll automatically stop by anytime something new pops up…with 300+ feeds in my newsreader, I just don’t have time for that.)
Once we get up into the two ‘best’ options — full-text feeds, either with or without ads — the ads don’t bother me quite as much, for two reasons. Firstly, the text of the post is generally longer than the ad and the ad can be easily ignored if I’m so inclined; and secondly, with Google’s targeting technology that picks which ads to run based on content, it’s more likely that an ad will be topic-appropriate (and, therefore, more likely to potentially catch my eye) with a full-text feed.
Me, I’m still going to stay ad-less in my feed. Advertising just isn’t that big of a deal to me — I signed up for Google AdSense out of curiosity, and so far, there’s no reason to get rid of it. I limit the ads to a single spot (below the first post on my index page, and between the post and the comments on my individual pages) so they’re visible but not intrusive (at least, that’s the intent), and every few months I get a little bit of money from Google. Not much — about $300 a year — but these days, every little penny helps.
I do also participate in the Amazon Associates program and the iTunes Affiliates program, but neither of those has netted me much of anything. I think I’ve gotten about $10-$15 from Amazon in the past few years, and I haven’t seen squat from iTunes yet. I just don’t have the readership numbers for these programs to be really profitable…but then, that’s not exactly something I worry about this. If I’d gotten into this whole blogging thing for the money, I’d have gotten out of it years ago.
(That said…would it kill you to go shopping every so often? “)
“Real, The” by Davis, Don/Tech Itch from the album Animatrix: The Album (2003, 8:02).
No clue why, but for some reason my DSL modem apparently froze up somewhere around 3pm this afternoon. I’ve reset it and we’re back up and running, but it looks like my site was effectively down for about two hours.
I’m sure the 30 people who might have tried to stop by were heartbroken.
“Revolution Rock” by Clash, The from the album London Calling (Legacy Edition) (1979, 3:51).
- Specifications are for the weak and timid!
- This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!
- You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
- Indentation?! — I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
- What is this talk of ‘release’? Klingons do not make software ‘releases’. Our software ‘escapes’ leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
- Klingon function calls do not have ‘parameters’ — they have ‘arguments’ — and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
- Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
- I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again.
- A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
- By filing this SCR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
- You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
- Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Seeing as how old school programmers think like Klingon programmers, I believe that it can be reasonably assumed that all old programmers are Klingon.
(Found on /.)
Looks like the inevitable intrusion of advertising into RSS feeds just gained a major player, as Google‘s Adsense for Feeds program has just been announced.
On the one hand, I can kind of see where quite a few people might be happy about this. As more and more people read their news through RSS feeds, fewer people are as likely to visit a website and see their ads, and revenue drops.
At the same time — hey, that’s one of the things I like about RSS feeds. While I’ve not yet unsubscribed from a feed because it started carrying advertising, it is a little bit annoying. Not very, at this stage, as so far all the ads are at the tail end of each post and can easily be ignored, but I’d still be happier without ads.
So, while I do use Google’s AdSense program on my site (as unobtrusively as possible while still allowing for the occasional check to hit my mailbox), I’ll not be dropping ads into any of my RSS feeds. The way I figure it, the miniscule amount of extra revenue it might generate isn’t at all offset by the annoyance it could cause my readers (and since the ads annoy me, I’ll work on the assumption that they probably annoy others, too).
“Lords of the Rhymes (Kool-Aid Brothers)” by Lords of the Rhymes (2003, 5:03).
It’s sad, really — for a show meant to continue the fine tradition of boldly going where no man has gone before (or no one, in the more politically-correct TNG era), all Enterprise managed to do was boldly go where no Trek series had gone before.
Straight into the tank.
I started watching Enterprise when it debuted, gave up midway through the first season (when I discovered that first-season TNG was a far better show), then ignored it until I started hearing rumors that this last season was actually watchable. I’ve been using bittorrent to watch season four, and while it’s admittedly better than the first season…well, really, it doesn’t take much to be better than the first season.
Tonight I finished things off, watching the end of the two-part arc following the derailment of the first effort at laying the foundation for the future United Federation of Planets, then following that up with the final episode of Enterprise.
(SPOILERS follow, if you care.)
First things first: while the two episodes immediately preceding the finale were decent — though I’d hesitate to collectively rate them any better than that (individually, the first half was definitely the better of the two) — the single biggest thing that stuck in my mind after watching them?
It’s really hard to take the leader of Earth’s government seriously when you’re expecting him to at any moment suddenly morph into a giant demon snake and start munching delegates right and left.
Nothing against actor Harry Groener, of course, but his role as Sunnydale’s Mayor Wilkins in Buffy has been so indelibly burned into my brain that it was all I could do to keep from giggling when he first appeared on screen.
As for Enterprise’s finale episode…meh. I’d say a big “meh,” except that “meh” is such an apathetic term of disgust that give it any sort of emphasis is rather oxymoronic.
First off, it wasn’t really an Enterprise episode, but rather a TNG episode with a lot of Holodeck re-enactments of events set at the end of Enterprise’s 10-year mission (six years after the last actual episodes we saw) and around the signing of the accord that forms the alliance that would eventually grow into the UFP. While it’s kind of nice to see Riker and Troi walking the corridors of NCC-1701-D again…it just doesn’t feel right as an end to this series. Rather, it comes off as last, final, desperate ploy by the Powers that Be to do anything possible to drag a few more viewers to the show.
Secondly, the TNG-era framing story for this episode is set during the events of the seventh season TNG epsiode The Pegasus. Without meaning any disrespect to either Marina Sirtis or Jonathan Frakes, it’s been around eleven years since The Pegasus was filmed, and while they’re both aging well, they’re not exactly identical to their appearance a decade ago. I could even have forgiven that for the sake of the story (though it would have been easier if the overall story was better), but apparently the makeup artists didn’t even bother to reference The Pegasus for this Enterprise episode.
Here we have a screencap (actually a composite of two screencaps) from The Pegasus:
And here we have a screencap from These are the Voyages…:
Minor things like the ten years of aging aren’t really terribly obvious. Marina’s face has thinned out a bit, and they’re both slightly heavier than they were during TNG’s run, but that’s not really that big of a deal. Amusingly, though, it means that Troi is actually curvier now than she was at the time (compare the shadows underneath her bust, for example), and I remember how much grumbling there was about her being little more than Trek’s version of T&A (that being Tits and an Accent). Of course, 7 of 9 and T’Pol were far more blatant about appealing to the teenage male demographic that way, but back in the TNG days, poor Troi got a lot of ribbing about being little more than eye candy.
More blatantly, though, is that the hairstyle is just wrong for both of them. Apparently when they’re not busy dealing with intragalactic incidents, the crew of NCC-1701-D spent all their free time in the hair salon. Troi is sporting a straighter, more natural hairstyle far closer to what she had in the movies than the heavily permed style of the original show, while Riker’s hair is less slicked back and comes complete with a Superman-style forelock falling across his forehead.
Nitpicking? Sure, and I’ll freely admit it. But if they’re going to not just pander to the old TNG fans by bringing back Troi and Riker, but actually place their framing story within an already existing episode, you’d think they could take a few minutes to pop the DVD in and do their best to match the actors appearances.
But then, given Enterprise’s notorious disregard for Trek canon, I suppose that this wasn’t really that much of a surprise.
Anyway. Continuing on.
Bringing Shran back for the rescue of his daughter seemed to serve two purposes only: to bring back one of the few interesting characters Enterprise has produced (and to give Jeffrey Combs — a fan favorite, and quite deservedly so, in my opinion, I’ve enjoyed all of the characters he’s played — one last star turn); and to come up with an excuse to waste half the hour on pointless “action”.
Oh, and to set up Trip’s demise…which, amazingly enough, actually comes across as even more pointless than Kirk’s death in ‘Generations’. At least when Kirk died he was trying to save his career the galaxy from a madman. Trip died so that Archer wouldn’t miss a speech. Oooh. Quite the noble sacrifice, that.
And speaking of the speech — we don’t even see it! We finally get to the historic moment when the charter establishing the alliance between Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar Prime, Archer strides to the stage to make what we’re told is a historic speech…and Riker tells the Holodeck to “end program” and he and Troi stride out onto the corridors of the Enterprise D.
Meh.
Other random observations before I end this little rant…
What was T’Pol doing after Archer hugged her? I could understand her being a little uncomfortable with this sudden show of affection, but…she just kind of wobbles. She holds her right hand out at an odd angle, and gives a slight, unsteady sway from the hips up. It’s really, really odd.
Did nobody on the NX-01 ever get promoted or change their jobs in the slightest over the ten years that the ship was in service? When the show opened Mayweather was at the helm, Sato was at the communications station, Reed was doing whatever he does…and ten years later, they’re all in exactly the same place (well, okay, Trip moved to Engineering…then died). No advancement? No promotions? How incredibly boring. The crew of the Enterprise-D at least showed a little motivation, changed things up, and actually grew over time. As far as this last episode shows, the crew of the NX-01 was depressingly static.
Wasn’t anyone curious or concerned about how the bad guys who everyone thought were limited to Warp 2 — Shran even mentions that his shuttle should be able to easily outrun them at Warp 4 — were somehow able to catch up to a top-of-the-line Starfleet ship running at Warp 7, engage it in battle, and board it without any real trouble at all?
Meh.
I wish the head of Earth’s government had turned into a giant demon snake and started munching on people. Right during the signing ceremony. Start with Archer, then finish off the rest of the Enterprise crew (except for Sato, who’s more than welcome to run around in her skimpy lingerie from the Mirror Universe episode as much as she likes…especially in my apartment) before Buffy magically transports a few hundred years into the future thanks to the help of Willow and a mysterious amulet that Giles found hidden underneath the school’s library, slays the demon, and tosses a few bad puns over her shoulder on her way back to Sunnydale.
At least that would have been a finale worth watching.
Something I meant to mention a bit ago, but spaced — I’ve recently become one of the contributing authors to Seattlest, the Seattle-centric group weblog run by the Gothamist empire.
I’m tracking any posts I toss onto Seattlest on my del.icio.us account for quick access, and my posts can also be found via this listing on the Seattlest site. Lastly, here’s my author bio.
Getting involved was actually pretty flattering, as I was actually invited in, thanks to one of the local editors reading Eclecticism and keeping an eye on my Flickr photostream. Hard to say “no” to an invitation like that!
“Silo, No. 5 – Three” by User, The from the album Abandon (2003, 2:31).