Television

For rambling about idiot box entertainment outside of the Star Trek universe.

More Reunions

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One of the more popular way to combat comment spam these days is to have your weblog software automatically turn comments off for posts more than a few days old. I’ve played with this ability in the past, but there’s one big reason why I’ve never stuck with it for very long: the comments that pop up on old posts can lead to some fun coincidences.

Late last year, I mentioned one such situation, where a bunch of people from Anchorage’s old punk community started stumbling across an old post of mine, started chatting in the comments, and ended up setting up their own website to keep in contact.

Over the past few months, I’ve been watching a very similar situation develop. Back in 2003 I posted about the annual “Goth Day/Bats Day” at Disneyland, when as many goths as possible spend a day flitting about the Magic Kingdom. A year later, a chance comment on that post mentioned a UK Disney Channel show called “Bus Life” that ran in 2004.

Apparently, that was enough for Google to push that post to the top of the rankings for people searching for “disney bus life” or “daniel bickerdike“, one of the actors on the show. Since then, that post has become a meeting point for both fans of the show and cast members, giving them a chance to reconnect after having all gone on to other projects for the last couple years.

I love watching stuff like this go on — and I’m very willing to put up with the occasional bout of comment spam in return for being able to watch old friends reconnect thanks to Google and some random piece of babble on my site.

iTunes “Prelude” by Mauve Sideshow from the album Meet Me in the Wasteland (1993, 2:20).

Happy π Day!

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It’s π day (3/14). Whee!

Randomness:

  • I’m in the last week of the quarter, touching up my last paper for English (no final, yay!) and cramming through the last few sections of Math in order to be ready for the final on Tuesday. Hence, why things have been relatively quiet lately. There has been action in the ‘eclinkticism’ sidebar (also known as my del.icio.us account, but a definite dearth of actual content. So it goes.

  • I’ve sent off my one birthday wish to my parents, and they’ve said they’ll consider it. Yay! This, of course, now has me wishing that my birthday was just a little bit earlier in the summer. Heh. In any case, I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m not, however, posting just what the birthday wish was, as I don’t want to jinx anything.

    • Said birthday, by the way, is May 3rd, at which point I’ll be turning 33. The same age Jesus was when he died, according to tradition. Should anyone want to get me anything (including, but not limited to, friendly e-mails wishing me well, cards, books, music, money, a 30″ Apple Cinema Display…y’know, little things…), I won’t complain.
  • Thanks to a random Google search, my first girlfriend dropped me a note to say hi and get back in touch. Pretty mindblowing, but it’s been a lot of fun catching up with her.

  • As we move into spring (finally!), I’m looking forward to getting out of the house a bit more over the spring/summer festival season and finding some more good photo opportunities. Events that I’m hoping to show up at over the coming months (pending days off from work, financing, and other random things that might get in the way), some of which Prairie is looking forward to accompanying me to, others of which she’ll smile indulgently, roll her eyes, and pat me on the butt as I walk out the door:

    1. Sakura Con 2006 (Saturday 3/25): Seattle’s anime convention. While I’m not huge into anime (I’ve enjoyed a lot of what I’ve seen, but I’m no big fan), I’m planning on heading down to wander around on Saturday, when they’re having their costume/cosplay contest. Should be lots of fun costumes wandering around.

    2. Emerald City Comicon (Saturday 4/1): Seattle’s comic book convention. Again, I’m not a huge comic fan (my collection consists of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta, the Clerks comics, and issues 1-10 of The Tick). However, I did have fun taking photos when I stopped by last year’s ComiCon, and hope to do the same this year. Again, I’m aiming for Saturday, to take advantage of the day’s costume contest.

    3. Norwescon 29 (Friday 4/12 – Sunday 4/14): I’ve been hearing about Norwescon since I came down to Seattle, as many of the regulars at the_vogue are also big into sci-fi, fantasy, role playing, and all the other various forms of entertainment that can be found at a fantasy convention. This year, I have a few friends that have been planning on going, so I figured it could be fun to take the weekend and actually go to this thing to see what I thought. Should be interesting….

    4. Folklife (Saturday 5/27): This will be my third jaunt to Folklife. I’ve got a small set of photos from 2004 and a larger set from 2005, we’ll see how many I come home with this year. Planning on Saturday as a definite day, other days may happen depending on scheduling (there are other people at work who also want to hit Folklife, we’ll just have to see how the weekend works out).

    5. Seattle Pride Parade (Sunday 6/25): Unfortunately, this one’s questionable right now, as that’s inventory weekend at work and the schedule is marked “NO OFFS” for this day. I’ve mentioned (ahem…whined…) about this to my manager, but I’m not sure yet if I’ll be able to make it or not. A shame, as I’ve been there in 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2005.

    6. Bumbershoot (Saturday 8/2 – Monday 8/4): A possibility, but questionable at this point. Prairie and I skipped last years, and may end up skipping this year also. If it weren’t enough that ticket prices keep getting higher and they’ve dropped Friday from the festival schedule, we’re looking into the possibility of taking a 2-week trip down to California in September, so timing and finances may not allow adding Bumbershoot to the mix. Until that’s confirmed, though, it’s still a tentative on my list.

And…I think that pretty much covers everything for now.

Oh, one last thing. Battlestar Galactica just wrapped up their second season. Oh. Wow. So good. If you’re watching the show, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re not watching it…well, you should be. Grab Season One from Amazon or Netflix, and Season Two from iTunes, sit your butt down, and watch the best sci-fi to grace the small screen in years.

Okay. Now I’m done.

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).

The End of the Countdown

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Two quick things regarding Lost:

  1. I’m afraid I didn’t bother with the usual recap of the last two episodes. I’ve been at work ’til 10pm on Wednesdays lately, so I just watched both of them back-to-back, and…well, I just didn’t feel like doing that. I doubt anyone’s heartbroken, but just in case…sorry!

  2. Oh, sure, the timer runs out…and then you just get to reset it again anyway? What a gyp!

I’m still really curious about the hieroglyphs, though.

Lost Heiroglyphs

iTunes “Blue Suit Boogie” by Indigo Swing from the album All Aboard! (1998, 3:53).

Olympics Opening Ceremony

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Prairie and I have been watching the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy, but…it’s after 11pm, the torch still isn’t lit, and according to news reports that give a 3-hour run time for the whole thing, it’s not over ’till midnight, which is too late for us. It’s a little frustrating — this thing’s on a tape delay, why couldn’t they have started it at seven or eight in order to get it done with at ten or eleven? Urgh.

We’ve enjoyed seeing the first two hours of the show. Mostly.

Good things: The Italians have a wonderful flair for theatrics, and some of the portions of the show have been just wonderfully bizarre. The cow ballet earlier in the show, the sun and moon balloons with the aerialists, the dance piece…all very much fun. We were also enjoying watching the parade of nations, where it was rather amazing how many of the smaller republics that just came into existence over the past few years with the fragmentation of Russia and parts of Europe have been able to send delegations to the games. Not to mention North and South Korea marching in together!

Bad things: The show was scheduled to start at 8pm, and I suppose that in theory, it did. However, from eight until nine was just blather about all the athletes, and the actual opening ceremony didn’t start until nine. Commercials, commercials, commercials! Every. Two. Minutes. Ugh…no matter what was going on, they had to break for commercials, and while they at least took advantage of the tape delay for the parade of nations, they didn’t seem to do so for the rest of the opening ceremony. I’m pretty sure that at least five to ten minutes of the presentation disappeared so that we could sit through more SUV commercials. Ugh.

And last, but definitely not least — the commentators were horrid! Here we are, watching the opening ceremonies of the biggest forum for friendly international competition, and every time they could, the commentators were bringing up every horrid, unfriendly, divisive piece of trivia they could. Italy was singled out as the third largest member of the US’s ‘Coalition of the Willing,’ Denmark’s entrance was used as an opportunity to talk about the Muslim cartoon scandal (and even worse, when the commentator couldn’t think of anything to say about Estonia, who entered directly after Denmark, he just returned to blathering about the Danish cartoons)…it was horrid. Badly done, and so incredibly inappropriate.

Hooray for the Olympics, and good luck to all the athletes from all the countries. But a big, big thumbs-down to NBC’s approach to presenting tonight’s ceremonies.

The IT Crowd

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Cory’s right — The IT Crowd is great.

Creator Graham Linehan has produced a cast of characters who exemplify everything I loved about Father Ted: complete, over-the-top silliness, likable villainy, and great comic foolishness. The setup for the show is as silly as Father Ted’s: two IT geeks in the basement of a large, abusive corporation get a new boss, a woman who lied about her IT experience on her resume. What follows isn’t funny because of its intricate plotting, but because of its willingness to lard absurdity on absurdity, so that each episode gets progressively weirder as it progresses (for example, in episode two, there’s a screamingly funny running gag about a fire that’s broken out in the basement, which has to be hidden from the abusive CEO when he comes down to check on everyone’s morale).

British humor and geek jokes (lots of ’em, too, from Flying Spaghetti Monster posters to RTFM t-shirts to EFF ‘Fair Use Has a Posse‘ stickers…essentially the entire set dressing) combined. Bonus points for basing the theme song off of Gary Numan‘s ‘Are Friends Electric?“, too. Fire up your bittorrent clients and enjoy!

iTunes “Are Friends Electric?” by Information Society from the album Darkest Hour, The (1997, 4:27).

Steelers take the Superbowl

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Neither Prairie nor I really know much about football, and we don’t really care to know much. However, that didn’t stop us from kicking back and having a fun time watching the game and doing our own form of silly armchair quarterbacking.

Favorite commentary moment: after a player got injured, the commentator was trying to figure out just what the injury was and said that, “I can’t tell if that’s an ankle or a head.” To which I responded, “good thing you’re not a doctor!”

Best commercials: the “Don’t Judge Too Quickly” series (for an insurance company…I think) were a close runner-up, as was the Bud Light “Streaker”, but my favorite (due to being completely bizarrely surreal) was the Burger King “Whopperettes” bit.

And, in the end, the Steelers took it. Still — at least the Seahawks were there.

And now, a few hours without TV before Grey’s Anatomy comes on. Code black!