eclecticism

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.

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)!

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

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.

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

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 arialists, 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.

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!

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

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!

Scribbled notes while watching last night’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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Scribbled notes while watching last Wednesday night’s episode of Lost (I actually watched it a few days ago, but just realized that I’d forgotten to post this. Oops!). Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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Scribbled notes while watching last Wednesday night’s episode of Lost (yes, I know, almost a full week late…but this was my first chance to finally watch it). Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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I have no idea where or when I found this, but it just turned up while cleaning out my ‘downloads’ directory.

The middle one’s my favorite.

Update: Turns out these were created by pangea_maru, and her original post also includes a great ‘cute but psycho’ Cylon Happy Bunny! Thanks Jennifer!

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:

• Last 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…

• Finally, 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!

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 /.)

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

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 624x352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320x240 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.

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.

Scribbled notes while watching last night’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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Scribbled notes while watching tonight’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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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.

Scribbled notes while watching tonight’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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Scribbled notes while watching tonight’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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A few weeks ago, after the promo for tonight’s episode of Lost promised that, “one of these survivors will be lost forever,” I put a poll up (both here and on my LiveJournal) to see who people thought was going to be the unlucky party.

Here’s the results… Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure what I got more excited about — the fact that there’s a Muppet-centric weblog that I just discovered, or that the Muppets may be coming back to TV!

> People have been buzzing about “America’s Next Muppet” for months now. Disney is still planning to relaunch the Muppets with a prime-time ABC “reality” parody series. […] > > A network representative has said that the Muppet project is still in the extremely early stages of development. But ABC has now officially ordered a pilot script and five additional script outlines for “America’s Next Muppet”. This will be shot in the format of a “reality show”, and will use a lot of the same syntax and cinematic grammar that the genre has developed, however like all past Muppet TV shows will be scripted. If ABC is impressed with the pilot episode script and the pilot episode, than the five outlines will start being turned into scripts and episodes. These six episodes are hoped to air in Spring/Summer 2006, and if successful then more episodes could be ordered, and the series continued.

Other fun news from the site: the short-lived “Muppets Tonight” show may be coming to DVD, and Palisades Toys have acquired the rights to create a line of Labrynth collectibles (including multiple Goblin King figurines with various outfits)!

Scribbled notes while watching Wednesday night’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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Scribbled notes while watching Wednesday night’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

Read the rest of this entry »

Scribbled notes while watching last night’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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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….)

Scribbled notes while watching last night’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…

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