Link

I took a few more pictures on Tuesday, but it was a lot colder out so my walk was a lot shorter. Nothing spectacular to show for it (you can view the bits I’ve posted here), but I did learn quite a bit so it was worthwhile. The temperature appears to be above zero again today, but I think I’ll cater to my illness and stay indoors. Stupid cold.

The TV season seems to be gearing up again, which is good — reruns were starting to irritate me. Most exciting is that Rome (Season 2) starts soon. If you haven’t watched the first season, I strongly recommend it. I think the only TV series better than Rome is Deadwood, and even that’s a tough call. Both are brilliantly written, brilliantly acted, and just top-notch productions all around. Turns out HBO knows how to make stellar TV. Stupid cold.

Watch it. Love it. Blog about it and tell all your friends to watch it. It’s too good to be so unceremoniously cancelled before it really starts. Ok. Go set your PVRs and Tivos. I’ll wait here.

• Heroes – Just watched the second episode. Love it. I started reading comic books when I was a kid and have always loved ‘em. This TV show holds huge promise and potential. Great characters.
• Studio 60 – Meh. Barely made it through the first episode, won’t be going back.
• Shark – It’s like House M.D. only with lawyers. And lousy acting. And terrible, terrible writing. I basically dislike every single character in the show.
• CSI – Grissom remains my favourite CSI in all three shows. This is top of my “gritty crime drama” list, and seems to be holding up well. (Yes, I know it’s all ridiculous and not at all like real life, but I don’t care…I still like it.)
• CSI: NY – This show continues to grow on me, and I like the characters a lot. Good stuff.
• CSI: Miami – Honestly, I’m not sure who watches this any more. Just watched this week’s episode and literally laughed out loud at the new transitions and other random effects. I won’t be bothering with this series any more.
• L&O: CI – No more Vincent D’Onofrio, so my interest is waning. They’ve replaced everyone on the show except Chris Noth, who was great when he was in the original L&O but doesn’t seem to be able to carry a show on his own. They may have jumped the shark by losing too many characters between seasons.
• Numb3rs – I like this show a lot even tho the math is apparently “questionable” at best. I don’t care. I’ve never really been much for math (even tho I use it “every day!”) so that stuff is mostly just gibberish to me. I like the characters (although Charlie’s getting on my nerves a bit). They seem to be concentrating more on the FBI parts and less on the dorky math parts this season, which is good. And yes, I like the silly bits at the end where the Eps family gets all quippy.
• House M.D. – Yes it’s a little formulaic, but I still like it a bunch. Good characters, usually interesting medical mysteries, fun sub-plots. Not stellar, by any means, but still several thousand times better than any given reality show.
• The Unit – Just started watching season 1, but it’s good and I’m glad it’s made it to a second season already. So far it seems like a strange cross between The A-Team and Desperate Housewives or something, but that’s OK by me.
• LOST – I’m beside myself with anticipation for Wednesday’s season opener. Eeeeee! Hurley! Yay! I love this show and I’m not even sure why. Just…awesome, even when at its most ridiculous.
• Battlestar Galactica – Also hasn’t started yet, but it remains the best science fiction TV series of all time. I’m getting the itch to buy the original BSG series on DVD and watch it, because apparently there are lots of little bits of continuity that have been carried over, and that’s cool. Absolutely “must watch” TV.

That’s pretty much all I’ve seen (or will soon see) this season. There’s more TV worth watching than I have time for, but that’s not a bad problem to have.

Um. Or not. Personally, I’ll save my money and instead of spending $51 ($44 USD) on a season’s worth of crappily-encoded episodes of CSI, I’ll spend $54 for a season on DVD. Some of which are even in high def!

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t watch enough TV to justify spending that kind of money on that kind of quality when I can, 95% of the time, order what I want from Amazon and have it on DVD at my house within a week. I also don’t buy music online, so maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. Maybe someday when music is $0.10/track and TV episodes are decent quality. Or, you know, 5 years from now when physical media has gone the way of the poor, poor Dodo and I have no choice.

Damned kids. Get off my lawn.

Go check Joe’s post for a great clip of David Cross ranting about this very thing.

*sigh*

Our day was relatively sedate, but that was largely because we began our celebrations Thursday evening, finally crashing at around 2am. Today was mostly sleeping in, eating bacon & eggers for breakfast, having a nap, cleaning some, and doing laundry. Dinner was garlic-ginger pan-roasted pork tenderloin with asparagus. After dinner we did what we usually do (gaming, reading), and watched an episode of Deadwood. Now it’s time for bed. All in all, not a bad day off.

I’ve set up reading spot in my office now, with a comfy chair, a table for my tea, a reading lamp, and an ottoman. I’ve finished On Writing Well, and am now rifling through the shelves trying to find something to read next. Oddly, the next book about writing I picked up — Getting the Words Right — isn’t terribly well written. The Invisible Computer, while interesting and written by someone I’ve admired since I did my thesis (Donald Norman), isn’t quite what I feel like reading at the moment. In the interim, I’m poking my way through the collected short stories of Roald Dahl. I haven’t yet gone to the library to get a library card and a book, so maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.

Also on the topic of tomorrow, I think I’ll use the leftover pork to make ginger pork fried rice for lunch. Yum.

Update: This is also happy news — Law and Order: Trial By Jury, the first real stinker in the L&O franchise, has been canned. The question is, what will Dick Wolf cook up next to stay ahead of the CSI gang? Stay tuned!

Sadly, Fox, being the morons they are, cancelled Firefly. There is, however…

A Movie.

I. Cannot. Wait.

(I’m currently watching When You Comin’ Back, Range Rider?)

2) There are a lot of people on the internet who seem to care way too much about really stupid things. The examples of this are endless, so I won’t bother going into specifics. Mostly I just want to say that a lot of folks just need to get a grip.

3) There are a lot of people on the internet who care a great deal about things that aren’t so stupid. Sifting these few delicious grains out of the deluge of chaff is hard. I’m becoming increasingly impatient with the internet and the content it provides. We need some sort of system that can help with this. Google is good at what it does, but it does not help sort by quality. Technorati and Blogdex and other similar services also suffer from the quantity-over-quality disease. There has to be a better way.

4) House M.D. is a good TV show. You should watch it. Hopefully it won’t get cancelled.

5) The new Battlestar Galactica, I’ve decided after long consideration, is the best sci-fi television series in history. I’m not kidding. It blows all the Star Treks clear out of the water, and I actually liked some of those. Firefly is the only other sci-fi series I can think of that even comes close.

6) I am sad that Enterprise has been cancelled, but not nearly so sad as I was about Firefly.

7) I wish the Max Headroom Show would just come out on DVD already. Come on, people.

8) Over the past couple of years I’ve realized that geek culture is now mainstream. Games, Comic Books, Bad TV Shows, Computers, and all that. I guess there were a lot more of us holed up in our parents’ basements playing Space Invaders, reading X-Men, programming NPC-generators on our Commodore 64s, and watching Kung-Fu than I thought. I wonder what constitutes “geek culture” now that will become mainstream when today’s young geek hits her 30s? I bet I wouldn’t recognize it if it hit me in the face.

9) I like ecto.

10) RSS feeds change how I use the internet. I am not entirely sure I like these changes. With RSS feeds, I do not browse, I scan. I also find myself relying on them, when there are a large number of sites out there that do not have them or to which I haven’t subscribed. Push technology just ain’t all that, no more now than it was in 1997. There’s a lesson in here somewhere about quantity over quality again, and how the sheer quantity of poorly-filtered (it’s not really unfiltered any more) information forces us to skim reams and reams of garbage simply because we don’t have time to dig through it all to find the stuff that’s actually worth reading.

11) We need much, much better filters. Also, librarians.

Once upon a time I, and legions of my like-minded brethren, believed that Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights was going to be all that and more. NWN did ship with a full editor suite, and the community has, over the past 3-4 years, produced some amazing modules and add-ons for the game. The editor, however, misses the mark for the “quickly” and “easily” parts of the equation by a very wide margin. I have spent altogether too many hours trying to create modules with the editor, but it is so clunky, anger-inducing, and esoteric that I have never been mule-headed enough to actually finish one. I strongly suspect that I’m not alone, and that’s with a decent technical/programming background. The best and most creative DMs I’ve known are not so technically minded, so the barrier to entry for those who would most benefit from such a tool is astronomically high.

So, the great promise of NWN never really bore fruit. People still use the editor, and more people do benefit from the results, but even so, the modules are prone to bugs (oh god, the bugs), crashing, lost save games, lost progress, and so much more. In the end, it’s a sad and frustrating system.

Here we are in 2005, surrounded by technology on all sides, and we’re still waiting for a game system that really puts the creative tools to make cool games in the hands of those who would best be able to use them.

Expanding on that, I look forward to the day where someone puts out a system that allows fledgling game-designer wannabes (like myself) to create persistent, massively-multiplayer game worlds. Sort of a NWN-like editor system (only significantly less painful to use) only for designing whole worlds and game systems that we can then host online. The “massively” part doesn’t even have to be that massive. Even if a world only hosts a maximum of 500 concurrent connections, that would be a good start. I strongly suspect this is a lot harder than I think, and I’m pretty sure it’s awfully hard. Someday someone will pull it off, and upon that day I will rejoice.

I’m also looking forward to the day where TV is less stupid and more like iTunes. I would happily pay for a service (either subscription, or piecemeal) that would let me download and view commercial-free TV shows on demand. Gleefully, I would pay for such a thing. Our current alternative, which is becoming very popular, is to not watch TV at all, but instead wait for TV shows to be released on DVD. We buy lots of TV shows on DVD and then watch them on our own schedule without the annoyance of having to fastforward through commercials. I’m hoping some giant mega-corporation comes up with a TV-on-demand service like this in the near future. There is TV out there worth watching, but the current delivery mechanism sucks.

Finally (for now): I’m looking forward to someone (probably Microsoft, since they own the rights) doing something interesting with the Shadowrun franchise. Think “Matrix Online” only gritter, cooler, and with 100% less Keanu Reeves. Mmm. And street shamans. Booyah.

Yay, Canada. Woo. Anyhow, it’s on tomorrow (Wednesday). Check out the Adidas-wear.