Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

Know Your Meme and More

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

The Internets and I had an excellent evening together tonight. It all started with a need to eat up the most perishable foods in the house before I head home for the holidays. What can you make with eggs and chicken, google of course has the answer. What, it needs spinach, too oh man, there’s a huge bag of it that’ll never get finished before I leave. I was lacking for tomatoes, but with a little salt instead Tuscan Chicken Scramble was a crazy fast meal with all the right ingredients.

While I was trying to eat my dinner, and watch episode of Sliders, my phone interrupted asking for advice on buy it’s girlfriend… rather my friend’s girlfriend a holiday gift. I love turning goals into gifts, especially for significant others, but having always been alone for Christmas, I often just help. He suggested a “cookbook? Not the greatest gift but… it will give us something to do together (and you know that’s something I think we need).” I respond, “Yes, activity book for adults, good deal. Another idea along the same line (something to do) tickets to a show,” eliciting “Ooh. That’s an even better idea. Damn you. I love that idea. I’m already in a bookstore And now I’m going to have to see what shows are going on”. Luckily, “our phones rock.” And he was able to do it all standing right there in the bookstore. All the while discussing the shows, which I was surprised to find I knew a lot about. For instance, earlier today I had in fact read about one of them selling out often. And that was in the same vain as another show I’d heard of. One my other goals, besides not being alone for Christmas, is to know what is going on, apparently I do, and I didn’t need the net for that, strictly speaking in this case. There is still something to be said for knowing facts, even with the net always in my cargo pocket.

SlidersSo I digress. But yes, that Sliders episode is the one where they did get Sabrina Loyd back to reprise the voice, but not the body of her former regular character.

Following dinner, I started cleaning house, and left the roomba to do it’s job downstairs. I sat down to wrap a gift and finally get to know, Know Your Meme. I really love their style, and there are few memes that I did need to hear an explanation on. But mostly it was an excellent trip to some of the best places on the Internet, without even going, just listening to them being extolled for their virtues. It was like a mini roflcon!

Finally, it came time to but a bow on that gift. I don’t have fake bows, but I do have red ribbon left over from that Halloween costume. So pause that know your meme episode, and head over to google. First result, of course, a ~2 minute you tube video. 5 minutes later, ribbon tied, gift wrapped ready for tomorrow.

Know Your MemeBack to more meme history goodness. Via the Three Wolf Moon episode, a quick stop, back by you tube for an actual meme instance, in the form of this amazing Three Wolf Moon music video set to a Disney song. And of course, now I stay up too late considering I’ve got a 9:30 meeting telling the internets about how it fully entertained me for a night.

Glee

Monday, October 5th, 2009

All this singing, and the fact that it seems right up my ally lead me to give the new tv show Glee a chance this season. Episodes one and two were good, but in three they broke down the, this is not really a musical, but a show about music barrier, which is kinda bad. And in episode four someone got pregnant; this breaks one of my rules, but I did watch episode five which was better than three and four. But really can’t we just have some fun, I know you want to go for the Emmy with a teenage pregnancy, but every show does not have to deal with a weighty issue in season one!

Rockband

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Since my friend Sparky got a job at Harmonix Thursday night games has frequently involved playing Rockband. I was never very good at Guitar Hero, and I was never a huge fan of the songs it came with but Rockband is awesome for two reasons:

  • Lots of great songs as downloadable content, which Sparky picks up for us.
  • Singing!

I have never been very musical. DDR and Guitar Hero proved that rhythm is not my thing. We’ll, the amount of concentration it takes me to clap in rhythm proved that long ago, but they reinforce it well. I’ve also never been good enough at singing to earn any sort of accolades for it. Thanks to my elementary school drama teacher for making me an understudy every year to get that little lesson across. But I still enjoy it, and I can apparently fake it well enough to make a machine happy, which makes me happy.

But I’m only any good on songs that I’ve heard before, so I have added the Rockband 1 & 2 songs to my usual playlist, so that I get used to them and learn what they sound like. I’ve been consequently paying more attention to all of the songs on my playlist and thinking about them in the same way as the songs that I’ll someday have to perform in from my friends to the satisfaction of the machine. It’s a lot of fun. I just wish that you could take any old song and play it in Rockband, as there are pleary of songs I already love to sing that aren’t options (pretty much all of Avril).

The other good thing about Rockband is that its introduced me to some new music. Avoiding advertising really cuts down on access to music pop culture. Well for those of us too cheap for satellite radio, and whose musical tastes are not well captured by Pandora. Anyways so lots of the new songs on the latest revision of my car mp3cd are from rock band. You know, i should really put my car mp3cd under subversion control. Anyways some of them are:

  • Panic at the Disco – Nine in the Afternoon
  • Weezer – Say it Ain’t So
  • The Main Drag – A Jagged Gorgeous Winter
  • Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye

But my two favorite songs these days, both oldies from the ’90s, that I really wish were in Rockband are:

  1. Alanis Morissette – That I Would be Good: I’ve had a cropped short version of this song for a long time, but the full length one is even better.
  2. Aimee Mann – You Could Make a Killing:This is the only Aimee Mann song that I even approach to liking, but it is great. She was in an episode of Buffy and even that association couldn’t make me like the song she sang in the show.

Speaking of oldies, Beatles Rockband. I’ve always had an issue with the Beatles. I love the parts of their songs that I remember from my childhood, listening to oldies radio, but the songs I never heard, and even the non-choruses that I don’t remember I don’t like very much. A couple weeks ago I went to Beatles Rockband night at Improv Boston, entirely because of a girl, but while I was there I noticed that I like a lot more of the Beatles catalog than I realized. Last week at Thursday night games we had an actual singer, Ethan, and so I eventually settled into providing some harmonies while playing the drums. I can actually drum to the Beatles with some sort of competence on easy mode! It was way more fun to drum when I didn’t suck at it.

Congradulations Kim Clijsters

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Congradulations to Kim Clijsters for making women’s tennis interesting again. Finally, there is once again a woman playing tennis who is not named Williams when it comes time to hand out trophies. Not that Clisters is newbie, but hey anything that prevents Williams vs. Williams matches is welcomed.

I would have watched, but for some reason the U.S. Open Finals were not on broadcast television and not on basic cable, but on some channel no one gets, WTF?! That is almost as bad as there not being a single College Football game on broadcast television last Saturday night! But hey, one problem at a time.

Endings Done Well

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

IMG_0849

Nothing profound is ending for me anytime soon, but it sort of feels like it due to some well done final episodes. A year in the making, the final, first episode of the Tim & Diana Show was released yesterday. Having matured greatly over the year the show was humorously insightful and a lot of fun for a roughly bimonthly break from reality to the world of meta reality. There’s a paper half written in my head for which the Tim & Diana show is but one support; hopefully, I’ll figure it out and write it down soon. I might have to wait until after digesting the directors commentary available on the DVD, which I hope my status as number one fan will get me a copy of.

Scrubs - My Finale 1

The other show that ended well was Scrubs. When I first moved to Boston, I lived for two weeks in a hotel in Burlington, MA. Only one of those weeks I was working. The first week I was dealing with moving my stuff and watching Scrubs. I watched seasons 1 – 3 in that week (I think). It was just amazingly hilarious. I forget which, but one of those early seasons is in the running for best season of television I’ve ever seen. Since then Scrubs has soured, so much so that I begged them to put the show out of its misery at the end of season seven (Note: no actual literal begging or letter writing occurred). That said season eight has been quite a surprise and the ending, while not funny, was so well done it can’t go unmentioned.

I just absolutely loved the wonder years type filmstrip ending to Scrubs, which I didn’t get around to watching until yesterday. I really liked the twist that it wasn’t saying from the future, what did happen, but only saying what might happen. The scenes totally hit me, if only I could look forward to that kind of thing (maybe I can). Also, the music in season 8 of Scrubs has been amazing and it continued to be in that scene.

Scrubs - My Finale 2.

I guess what I’m saying about scrubs is that now I’ve enjoyed it for two reasons: for the comedy that it was and the drama it became. Before this episode I somewhat resented how it was often more touching the funny in than latter seasons.

Star Trek @ Brattle

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Star Trek - 118 - ArenaI’ve been in a Star Trek mood since seeing the movie last week and subsequent debates about it’s merits with the handful of people who I saw it with. So when I heard that the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square was going to show six episodes of the original series on their big screen tonight for cheap, I decided to go and see two of them. I just got back.

Wow, am I glad that I didn’t pay to see all six. I mean I know there is a reason why I’ve not bothered to ever watch them (I have them all), but they were pretty bad. Although, as with Indiana Jones, seeing them with an enthusiastic audience probably did help. Also, the source material was the remastered DVDs, so the quality was much improved over my recorded from the G4 channel reruns. In any case, I saw:

  1. Star Trek – 118 – Arena
  2. Star Trek – 126 – Errand of Mercy

I feel that perhaps I’ve been too hard on Star Trek 11, it was much improved over the originals. But then I suppose the next level up is to compare it to the original movies, which I haven’t seen in many years.

Star Trek (11)

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

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I just got back from seeing the new Star Trek movie! How do you ask, well Celeste, told the xkcd forums, who told me. It seemes the Internet and the theater knew nothing about it otherwise. I still don’t know how she found out about it, but not many people did. It was not packed. I don’t quite understand why you wouldn’t promote a sneak preview enough to pack one showing. Anyways. I don’t want to give away any spoilers so the rest will be quite generic.

The movie started out strong, and quickly established a great action drama balance. I was drawn in well before the opening credits. The opening credits lacked a certain familiar tune. I mean, what they had, it’s similar, but it did not fulfill my desire to hear the music. The closing credits did so that was good.

So the movies going along just great and then there is a major plot point, something bad happens, and after that the movies just not the same. However, due to the continuities involved, there was a choice the writers could have made; that I would have made, but they did not. This takes them down a road towards a disappointing conclusion.

There is one gripe I can be specific about, because it was in the trailer. In the trailer they show a starship being constructed on the ground, on pylons. This utterly ridiculous. First, it is not consistent; all other star trek ships have been built in space. Second, if NASA didn’t even want to launch all of the international space station at once cause it weighted too much, imagine a star ship. Finally, star ships are not made to fly in the atmosphere, and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be rocketed up there, and they don’t have that kind of transporter capability at that point in the timeline; so how the hell does it get off the damn planet! I’m sorry there’s just no way that is realistic at all.

So this movie, being an odd one (11) was bound to suck (as all the odd numbered ones do), and so it did, although I will continue to applaud the strong start it had. And if you claim that this was really a different movie sequence then the other one then it is number 1, also odd, also bound to suck. This movie will not reboot the franchise. I’m not even sure the tag line “The future begins” is appropriate.

I do want to end on a high note. I really liked all of the new actors for the major characters, and they really did a good job of working in everyone’s lines from the show. They also hit all the classic elements but they did some of them in different ways. This is very similar to how Get Smart did things, and is applaudable. I would see a squeal involving them, but not in the time-line that extends from this film, which is the real problem with it.

On This Day: March 18th

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

March 18th is one of those days that I remember for a having a rather unremarkable collection of highly related events that occurred (or were said to have occurred) on it. On this day:

And in 1998 I knew all of this without having to vaguely look up things up on the net to remember why it’s one of those days.

Update: While researching the links for this post, I learned, or relearned, that Danica is in two episodes of How I Met Your Mother as Trudy. The episodes are The Pineapple Incident and Third Wheel. Clearly both of those were worth a re-watch. Apparently she’s also in The West Wing. There’s a vote for that show. I still haven’t decided what show from my list, I should start. Luckily I’ve been to busy for a show recently.

Cleveland 2009: The Rest of It

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

The rest of my Cleveland trip was just as fun as the first afternoon. Lets call cover it in parts:

Competition
We're team 677. In the Center.
There is a lot to be said for being a spectator and not actually a member of the team. Although, most of it involves being able to skip out on most of the opening and awards ceremonies without setting a bad example. Although I later felt a little bad blogging through one I did go to, although; I did finish before Mr. King, Dublin FIRST teacher and mentor extraordinaire won the Woody Flowers award. As far as the rest of the competition results are concerned Dublin and Homeschool both lost in the semifinal round. That is, there was a 75% chance (ignoring skill) that one of OSU FIRST’s three teams would be in the finals and the other 25% happened. CSG came in 48th of 59 teams, but I have confidence they will do better in Torronto. I’ve told EC I’ll go to Atlanta for nationals if they team wins the chance. By told, I mean I said yes when she asked if I would.

Binary Note
Thursday before lunch one of the girls, Lauren, received a note in binary encoded ASCII from a boy on another team. The boy, had overheard how much she liked his teams button, which included something in binary on it; although, I never got a good enough look to figure out what it was beyond what appeared to be a 24 bit number with at least bits 0 and 23 set (meaning its not a team number). This reminded EC of the troubles we had a few years back with some girls who were at the competition primarily to flirt, but that was clearly not the motive here so we helped Lauren decode the message. Unfortunately we did have to call someone to look up what the values for ‘A’ and ‘a’ were. I remembered 65, but I forgot what base that was in, and well as if it was for ‘a’ or ‘A’. It said “Hey What’s up? I’m from team ” which was significantly more benign that we were expecting. Some girls from the boy’s team came and explained/apologized to our team, and Lauren, as far as I can tell refrained from humiliating the poor guy. Hey, at least his note got read; cause, yeah, that’s unlikely to happen even at the segway/geekfest that FIRST competitions are.

Good Answers
The Robot in the Pit
Josh and I visited the pit once on Friday afternoon. This is in stark contrast to our years on the team, when I lived in the pit, and even last year when we helped the girls do some real time debugging. We went down and found about 5 girls preparing to work on the robot, which had just finished it’s last match of the day, if I recall correctly. Josh and I corned a freshman, Ann, and started asking questions. The following is like how the conversation went:

Me: What’d you do on the robot?
Ann: Software, but for the JV robot
Me: Oh, how is the software for that robot different from this one?
Ann: They are the same
Me: How does that work?
Ann: They use the same mechanism and controls. We designed it that way.
Me: How do you deal with constants related to the motors themsevles or other bits that do vary from robot to robot?
Ann Well, we’ve actually got two copies of the software each with the different tweaks, but otherwise they’re the same.

I was impressed. I’m pretty sure that the robot controller doesn’t have a use accessible file system, so the only next best idea I could think of is impractical. So, not only is it a good design for something that is not actually a robot problem, but a meta problem caused by having two robots, but one of the freshmen was able to speak intelligently to the design and implementation.

Team Dinner and Nightlife
At the team dinner I sat near EC and three other freshmen girls from the team. These girls were huge Gilmore Girls fans; much larger than me. This served a good conversation starter, although; they did not like my answers to the standard questions. I think they are pretty good answers, I didn’t like theirs either. I guess its somewhat comforting that I’ve got a different outlook on it than they do. Moving on from that topic, it was a really fun dinner, and talking to the girls all night brought back at lot of the vibe I remember from being on the team. After dinner the mentors went out to a posh bowling ally/ bar on the same block. The previous night we’d bowled a few games there. I came in second until we had to finish the third game before they closed the lanes down in five minutes and things got sloppy. These reminded me of the great team parties we used to have, and complimented the vibe I had from dinner.

Leaving
The Only Nice Block in Cleveland
My college room mate George, who loathes living in Toledo every day, came to see Josh and I in Cleveland for a three hour reprieve from looking outside and seeing Toledo. He made it just in time for the final match of the competition, which I’m sure made the trip more exciting. Afterwards we skipped out on the awards to grab a bite to eat before heading back to Jersey. We again went back to the one nice block of restaurants on 4th street for dinner. Before we left, I forgot to give EC back her phone charger, which had been left in our hotel room along with her chap stick, which was returned successfully. Over a text conversation during dinner we decided she’d simply have to come to Boston to get it back…

End of Angel

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Last week I finished watching Angel, the spin off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Overall I didn’t like the series nearly as much as Buffy. It was darker, and had more action. These are traits that made Star Trek Deep Space Nine such a nice change from Star Trek the Next Generation, but they did not work positively for Angel in my mind. Missing from Angel was the whit and humor present in Buffy.

Spoilers Follow
I’d been told that seasons 4 and 5 of angel (the final two) were the best. I completely disagree. The best season of Angel was season 2, especially the story arch at the end in the alternate, daemon dimension. In season 3 the show seemingly jumped the shark because Angel had a son and he grew up overnight, that was nothing. In season 4 they had Cordelia sleep with him, having held him in diapers a mere handful of episodes beforehand. They continued to burn up the capitol in Cordelia’s character throughout the rest of season 4, never actually explaining how everything was happening. They eventually claimed that everything that happened since season 1 was a setup for the evil that occurred in season 4. That is hogwash and I don’t buy it, the writers were just being lazy. Season five was just plain awful, they were constantly looking over their own shoulders and the finale was crap; they cut to credits right before the biggest battle that ever took place in the Buffyverse.

Angle did have some saving grave due to the fact that it had many surprising guest stars. Of course, Buffy, Willow, Spike, Faith, and Andrew? made appearances from time to time on the show. He’res my thoughts on some of the others:

  • Josh Holloway – The first vampire killed by Angel, Josh is better known as Sawyer from Lost.
  • Daniel Dae Kim – Also from lost, Jin, had a 12 episode stint as a lawyer for the evil lawfirm wolfram & heart before being turned into a zombie.
  • Adam Baldwin – Known as Jayne from Firefly, Showed up for 5 episodes at the end as strong-ass bad guy. He delivered what I consider to be the best line in the whole show. Angel sets him up, “people who don’t care about anything will never understand the people who do.” Marcus Hamilton responds, “Yeah, but we won’t care.” It is so straight out of firefly’s script, it was perfect. Also, it is in the middle of a fight sequence.
  • Gina TorresZoe, also from Firefly was the bad guy from the awful season four.
  • Sarah Thompson – Hasn’t been in anything of note since Angel, but before she was in the craptacular movie Cruel Intentions 2. But she totally wins the the hotly contested prize as the hottest girl in the show. Runners up include Alexa Davalos, who’s x-men’s rogue like character had no business being in the show at all and Stephanie Romanov, who’s character was a well rounded villain who died at the right time, before joining the good fight.
  • Amy Acker – Also a runner up on the hottest list, she’s slated to be in Dollhouse, the new Joss show everyone is salivating over. Of course, being in 70/111 episodes and the main title credits hardly counts as being a guest star so I’ll end the list here.

Anyways, now I have to choose my next show. I’m accepting input, the choices are: