Battlestar Galactica

On Coining Euphemisms

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Just a quick word of advice.

When deciding to coin a euphemism, one might want to find out if the phrase in question has already been appropriated for something else.

For example, this discussion in the Flickr Battlestar Galactica group:

spincycle: “…I do think we’ll be getting back to an Adama-Laura conflict/resolution story fairly soon (either this season or early next). They’ve been chummy lately, time to toss that salad a bit.”

Gaudior: “I’d like to see them ‘toss the salad’ (my new euphamism)!”

Hee. I’m amused.

For those not in the know, ‘toss the salad’ is already a euphemism for a particular sex act. Here’s a slightly Not Safe For Work definition (no nudity, just text descriptions of a non-mainstream kink).

iTunes “Del Davis Tree Farm” by Primus from the album Tales from the Punchbowl (1996, 3:23).

BSG on the iTMS followup

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Just a quick followup to my post comparing Battlestar Galactica downloads via Bittorrent and via the iTMS: according to MacRumors, recent BSG episodes are appearing in an uncropped widescreen ratio.

Of course, the resolution is still aimed solely at iPods, but I’m running out of ways to rationalize snagging the free-but-technically-illegal Bittorrent downloads rather than the cheap-and-legal iTMS downloads. This is a good thing (except for my bank account)!

iTunes “Music Reach (1/2/3/4)” by Prodigy, The from the album Prodigy Experience, The (1992, 4:12).

Whoops…something slipped.

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And…we’re back. The server my site resides on went down about 3pm yesterday, and didn’t come back until sometime this morning. Sorry ’bout that — these things do happen from time to time, though.

In the meantime…

Yesterday, a customer came wandering into the store. “Hi there,” I greeted him. “Anything we can help you with today?”

“Yeah, I wanted to look at a couple cameras.” Then he paused and took a closer look at me. “Um…are you Michael? Of Eclecticism?”

I laughed. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“I’m Joe — Pop Astronaut.”

And another connection was made between the online world and real life. We chatted for a bit, then got him set up with the camera he’d been considering. Small world!

Small bits related to my recent re-acquaintance with television:

  • Desperate HousewivesLast night, Prairie and I finished our Desperate Housewives Season One marathon, which we’d been working on for the past couple weeks. We’ve both been enjoying watching Season Two on Sunday nights, and have been borrowing Season One so that I could get caught up on all the back story.

  • Battlestar Galactica has started up again also, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid any articles about the first episode of the second half of Season Two until I get a chance to watch it myself. The episode is sitting on my ‘puter…I just need to get a chance to watch it! Maybe tonight…

  • LostFinally, Lost finally starts up again this Wednesday — and because I’m working until 10pm that night, I’m not going to be able to see it until I get a chance to download it! Grrrrr…stupid work. ;)

And I think that pretty much brings us up to date. Plans for tonight are light: work ’til 6pm, do my reading for school tomorrow, have dinner, and watch tonight’s Desperate Housewives. Non-stop excitement, I tell you!

Best TV of 2005

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Of Time’s list of the best TV shows of 2005, I’ve only seen one — but I’m not going to argue at all with their assessment. Number one on the list…

Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi)

Most of you probably think this entry has got to be a joke. The rest of you have actually watched the show. Adapted from a cheesy ’70s Star Wars clone of the same name, Galactica (returning in January) is a ripping sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with religious fundamentalists (here, genocidal robots called Cylons), sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and even a prisoner-torture scandal. The basic-cable budget sometimes shows in the production, but the writing and performances are first-class, especially Edward James Olmos as the noble but authoritarian commander in charge of saving the last remnants of humanity. Laugh if you want, but this story of enemies within is dead serious, and seriously good.

(via /.)

iTunes “Panzermensch” by And One from the album Virgin Superstar (2000, 5:04).

Time to put my money where my mouth is?

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Ten months ago, when I was trying to figure out BitTorrent so I could keep up with Battlestar Galactica, I wrote this in a comment:

As it is, I’d gladly pay a few dollars per episode to download high-quality versions of this show (and, theoretically, other shows that I might be interested in in the future), much like I currently do with music from the iTMS (with the caveat that I’d expect any DRM to be no more restrictive than what the iTMS uses).

And wouldn’t you know it — Battlestar Galactica is now available through the iTunes Music Store at $1.99 per episode! Very nice.

Of course, over the past ten months I’ve become accustomed to the quality afforded through captures of HD broadcasts: the episodes I download through BitTorrent are ~350Mb each and widescreen at 624×352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320×240 pixels. Of course, there is the risk of getting a bad quality rip from BitTorrent that wouldn’t hold up to the norm, while it’s probably safe to assume that the officially sanctioned videos from Apple will be consistently good quality.

As an experiment, I purchased the most recent episode of BSG (‘Pegasus’) and compared Apple’s version to the version I downloaded via BitTorrent.

Battlestar Galactica’s ‘Pegasus’
iTMS BitTorrent1
Filetype: .m4v .avi
Length: 45:27.04 44:19.03
Filesize: 207.26 MB 345.80 MB
Time to download: I didn’t immediately think to time this, roughly 20-30 minutes on my connection. Varies depending upon the number of active BT clients: at best speed should match the iTMS time; at worst speed could take anywhere from hours to days.
Dimensions: 320 x 240 624 x 352
FPS: 24.00 23.98
Video encoding2: -NA- Generic MPEG-4
Audio encoding3: AVC0 Media MPEG Layer 3
Data rate: 636.72 kbits/sec 1106.58 kbits/sec
DRM: Apple FairPlay v2 None
Comparitive: At native sizes, the iTMS video is sharper but noticeably darker. The BitTorrent copy isn’t as crisp, but being a few notches brighter makes it easier to see (a situation exacerbated by my using an old 17″ monitor that already has its brightness and contrast at maximum and really needs to be replaced when I can afford to do so). Even so, the iTMS video is gorgeous: darker and smaller (2/3 the height and 1/2 the width), but better quality — at native size.

At full screen, the smaller size, greater compression and lesser data rate of the iTMS track is very obvious. Compression artifacts not noticeable at 320 x 240 are very visible when blown up to my monitor’s standard setting of 1152 x 870. The BitTorrent video, while softer, doesn’t show nearly as much artifacting (but then, given the larger native size and widescreen ratio of the video, it’s also only being enlarged 247% as opposed to the iTMS version’s 360%).

All in all, while the iTMS video is better quality at native size, the BitTorrent copy is far more watchable when blown up to full-screen.
Notes: 1: Due to the distributed and decentralized nature of BitTorrent, the reported statistics, while representative of the quality of most BT downloads I’ve received, are only definite for this particular copy of this episode.
2: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Sound Track’.
3: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Video Track’.

So, now what? I did say in the original quote that I’d happily pay for “high quality” copies. At the moment, with Apple’s focus on optimizing the video for the iPod, I’m not sure that the video offerings are quite enough to tempt me away from BitTorrent on a regular basis. It’s close…but not quite there.

Unless someone gives me an iPod video for Christmas, of course. Then I may need to re-evaluate. ;)

Frack!

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Hehe — Prairie and I just finished watching Season One of Battlestar Galactica. I’d seen it before (on my ‘puter via BitTorrent), ’twas the first time for her.

She’s hooked.

We may end up taking some time to watch what there is so far of Season Two (which is sitting on my ‘puter, again thanks to BitTorrent) so she can catch up to where we are before they start broadcasting new episodes in January.

On that whole TV thing…

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Most people who’ve known me for a while are aware that I’m not much of a fan of television — and actually haven’t really watched television in a long, long time. Seeing as how a couple people commented on my watching Lost, I thought it might be worth addressing this. :)

I’m really not sure when exactly I got sick of TV, but my best guess would be sometime around 1992/1993 or so I decided that it just wasn’t worth my time. Most programs didn’t have enough intelligence to keep my interest, and even when I did sit down to watch something, the insipid and insultingly stupid commercials would drive me up the wall. So I quit.

In the intervening years I’ve seen bit and pieces of shows here and there, generally when I’ve been over at friends houses. For the most part, though, I’ve relied mostly on recommendations from friends as to what shows were actually worth watching…and then I’d wait for the DVDs to start coming out. Thanks to DVD, over the last few years I’ve seen (for the first time) all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, the first four seasons of The X-Files, and the first four seasons of The West Wing.

More recently, adding BitTorrent to my repertoire has allowed me to keep up with more recent shows. I first saw Firefly this way, I’ve been keeping up with Battlestar Galactica, Gray’s Anatomy got a few trial weeks, and I’ll soon be watching the first three episodes of Surface to see if it’s worth keeping an eye on.

So I’m not really entirely against television as a whole — in a very general sort of way, yes, I think that TV is primarily a waste of time, and most people (especially children) would be far better off finding better ways to spend their time — but I’m not entirely opposed to finding specific shows that are better written, more intelligent and/or more entertaining than most.

I’d have been quite happy sticking with BitTorrent and watching things at least a day or two behind most of the rest of the world, too, except for two things: Prairie, and Lost.

Prairie, while sharing many of my views on the majority of the shows on TV these days, has never been quite as militant about her anti-TV views as I have been over the past few years. She’s had a few shows that she’s been enjoying keeping up with, with her top three being ER, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. All during last year, she’d occasionally drop tidbits of what was going on in that week’s episode of Lost to me…and then, after getting me to admit that it sounded interesting, and determined to get me hooked, she picked up the Season 1 DVD set when it came out.

We spent the next week powering our way through all of Season 1 — and she won. I’m hooked. So, Wednesday nights are now “Lost Night” for us. Admittedly, I still grit my teeth during most of the commercials (and even the ones that are cute once or twice get extremely grating the twentieth or fiftieth time they show up), but I’m quite enjoying watching the show itself.

So I’m still primarily anti-TV, and am far happier spending my free hours either fiddling with projects on my computer, wandering around town with my camera, or getting together with friends whenever possible. For one hour each Wednesday night, though, I’ll be joining the majority of America in setting back, grabbing some munchies, and keeping up with this week’s adventures on the boob tube.

(Oh, and while I’m just not interested enough in a hospital soap opera to get sucked into ER, she just might get me hooked on Desperate Housewives if I’m not careful. The last two episodes have been pretty entertaining, I must admit….)

Battlestar Galactica Season 1…done!

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Up until this week, I never got the whole thing with people downloading and watching shows on their computer. I’ve got such a low opinion of the majority of TV shows that I just couldn’t see spending the time and resources on such a project.

Then I got bit by the Battlestar bug.

Suddenly, I can see the appeal. Three days ago, I got curious enough about the currently-running Battlestar Galactica series to ask for help on finding the episodes so that I could watch them. Now, as of just a few minutes ago, I’ve watched all that there is — and, amusingly enough, I’ve actually watched more than has been broadcast here in the US. All thirteen episodes were broadcast in Britain a few months ago, and those are the copies available on the ‘net. So, while the broadcasts on the Sci-Fi Network are only up through episode eight, I’ve just finished off the entire season.

End result? This is really good stuff. They’ve done an incredible job of re-imagining the show, and even better, have managed to keep up an extremely high level of quality throughout the show. Since the broadcasts here in the US still have another five weeks to go before they hit the season finale, I won’t go into any details or spoilers, but those of you who might be watching the show as its broadcast are in for quite a treat.

The DVD of the miniseries is now very high on my “to buy” list, and I’ll be picking up the DVD set for the miniseries as soon as it comes out — while I’ll admit that the quality of the shows I downloaded was far better than I expected, it still won’t compare to full DVD resolution and (I hope) full 5.1 surround. Battlestar may not be getting any ratings points from me during its broadcast run (though they wouldn’t in any case, as I don’t subscribe to cable), but they’ll definitely be getting my money for the DVDs. Hopefully they’re gathering enough eyeballs during their broadcast run to keep the show on the air and at its current level of excellence for a good long time to come.

(Yes, I know that this is a sticky situation legally, and in all honesty, if I did subscribe to cable, I probably would have been quite content watching the episodes as they broadcast and contributing to the ratings. However, I continue to hold fast to my belief that cable television is, on the whole, an incredible waste of money. As stated above, though, once the DVD sets are available, they’re going into my collection.)

iTunes “Track 06” by Grover from the album One With the Universe (1998, 7:00).

Battlestar Galactica Episode 1

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This is incredibly cool: The Sci-Fi Channel has posted the first episode of Battlestar Galactica season one (not the miniseries that’s currently available on DVD, but the currently-running TV series) on their website, free, uncut, and without commercials.

Just go to the Battlestar Galactica site and click on the banner at the top of the page. You’ll need RealPlayer, unfortunately, but that’s the only downside I can see.

I know what I’m watching when I get home from work tonight.

(via /.)

iTunes “Black Flys pres. Club Flys 1 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Black Flys pres. Club Flys 1 (full mix) (1997, 1:13:16).