Ok, so…Firefly, before the new Battlestar Galactica came on the scene, was the best sci-fi tv series of all time. Now I’d say it and BG are running neck and neck for top spot.

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

A Movie.

I. Cannot. Wait.

…The A-Team.

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

1) Sin City is great. Go see it. I’m already looking forward to getting the DVD and watching it again, then watching the commentary track. Usually I don’t care about commentary tracks, but this one will be interesting. It’s really a piece of art.

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.

I just stumbled across a random Dungeons and Dragons reference on the interweb, and it reminded me of something that I’ve been looking forward to since I was a D&D-playin’ C-64 hacking teenaged geekette: The ability to quickly and easily create modules for a computer version of D&D.

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.

I might be showing my age a little, but I’m really looking forward to seeing this. I remember hearing about “The Crazy Canucks” when I was a kid (probably while listening to the CBC in the morning with my Dad, which is also how I happened to hear “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” for the first time), and there’s just something about that ski team that says “Canada” to me.

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