Blackmoor Vituperative

A week or so after I mention that Adrianne Palicki is my new favorite, I hear that she is pegged to play Wonder Woman in the new TV reboot of the classic Linda Carter series.

Based on looks alone, I think Megan Fox would make a better Wonder Woman, but based on her comments about the character, I am glad that she wasn’t cast in the part.

I wish Ms. Palicki the best of luck. I hope her show does better than the Bionic Woman reboot (which I liked, but which suffered from producer interference that ultimately killed the show).

My favorite part of Glee is when they sing and dance, because it pads out the show so I do not have to listen to as much of the annoying dialogue. Actually, my favorite parts are the brief moments of black-screened silence just before they go to a commercial.

We recently attended DragonCon 2010 (my portion of the trip paid for by my favorite client and soon to be employer, OneBookShelf). We had fun and we are glad we went. Here are some of my observations and reflections, in no particular order.

Trader Vic’s

We had dinner Thursday night at Trader Vic’s, a restaurant that claims to have invented the Mai Tai. They certainly do serve a good Mai Tai — no argument there. It’s also a very neat place to eat. I rather wish I had taken some time to wander around and look it over, but I was in the company of a number of OneBookShelf folks and their dates, so this did not occur to me at the time.

Dinner went well. I had some kind of mixed seafood soup, which was quite good. I also somehow managed not to do or say anything irreversibly offensive to the OneBookShelf folks, although I don’t know how I managed it with two Mai Tais in me. I spent most of the time talking about role-playing games with a pleasant fellow named Luke.

The best advice for DragonCon

This was the first (and possibly the last) time we attended DragonCon, so we read up on it to see what sort of advice veterans of the convention had to offer. The best and most useful advice we found was to carry a messenger bag: for snacks, the con schedule, etc. As it happens, I picked up two black leather messenger bags for super cheap a few years ago: this was the first time we had ever used them, and they were invaluable.

Costumes

My camera sucks. It’s fine for outdoor photos in bright daylight (it’s quite good at that, really), but in anything less than bright light, it’s abysmal. It takes several seconds to focus, and anything more than a few meters away in other than bright light will come out dark and murky. Even so, I took a couple of hundred photographs.

There were some amazing costumes. I probably only photographed a quarter of those I saw, and I am sure that I only saw a quarter of those at the convention (if that). The most confusing costumes, I think, were the Dalek women: women dressed not in Dalek costumes, but in Dalek inspired costumes. I saw several over the course of the weekend: each different, but recognizably of the same theme. I still do not understand it.

My favorite costumes were typically very small and worn by slim young women. In my younger, single, sexually frustrated days, I probably would have tried hitting on nearly all of them. I will be forever grateful that those days are behind me, and I can admire young women in costume without wanting any attention from them.

Lines are for suckers

I spent about five hours standing in line on Friday. I got really tired of standing in line, and decided that I would not stand in line (for more than a few minutes, anyway) for the rest of the convention. This actually worked out much better. For the rest of the convention, I showed up a few minutes late, and was immediately seated almost every time. There were two or three panels that were full when I got there, so I had to go find something else, but in some cases the “something else” wound up being really interesting. For example, I saw cool short films such as Heartless and Treevenge.

The one time I did stand in line (after deciding not to do so anymore) was for a horror movie panel. I got in line 15 minutes before the panel was scheduled to start, and stood in line for 45 minutes (this is not a typo). Thirty minutes after the panel was supposed to start, the person at the door told us that the room had filled up an hour ago, and that we were all standing in line for nothing.

Thank you so very much, mister con staff person.

The best panels

The most entertaining panel was the one with Dana Snyder (and some other folks from Adult Swim). Dana Snyder is the voice for Master Shake on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and the voice of The Alchemist on Venture Bros. I laughed almost continuously. He is a funny, funny guy.

The most unexpectedly interesting panel was the one with Luke Perry (best known for 90210, although he is or was apparently in a post-apocalyptic television series that I have never seen). He told stories about movies he’d worked on and directors he’d worked with.

And of course the aforementioned short films were (mostly) very entertaining.

Friends make a con worthwhile

I am very glad that my spouse went with me to the convention. We were able to keep each other company. I can’t imagine how dull it would have been, had I been alone. I knew no one else there, and frankly, attending a con alone is depressing.

Celebrities are not your friends

I had an odd realization on Friday night, after waiting in line for over an hour to get into the MST3K / Cinematic Titanic panel (which wound up just being a Cinematic Titanic panel, despite what the program schedule stated — and one fan who asked about that was mocked by the panel moderator, which was pretty damned childish, in my opinion). After waiting for over an hour in line, outside, a block away, I finally got in and got a seat which was not too bad. When the panel started soliciting questions, I got in line, but they stopped taking questions after the person in front of me asked his. Eh: it happens. Then they showed a Cinematic Titanic film that I own and had seen a few times already. The aspect ratio was wrong (it was 4:3, and was supposed to be 16:9). I informed the projectionist, but he could not figure out how to fix it, so he didn’t. The movie thus being unwatchable, I left and found something else to do (a very entertaining panel on steampunk in film: one of the panelists being Hunter Cressall of “the Mac killed my inner child” fame).

Earlier that day, I had spent over an hour waiting in line on the sixth floor for a pair panels (one after the other) on the eighth floor (I do not know how many floors down the line went) featuring Bill Corbett and Trace Beaulieu (both formerly of MST3K: Corbett is now part of RiffTrax, while Beaulieu is part of Cinematic Titanic). The panels were both very entertaining. Corbett read a short stage play he’d written, while Beaulieu had some of his friends (MST3K alumni, mostly) read verses from his book, Silly Rhymes For Belligerent Children. I enjoyed both panels a great deal, and bought the book by Beaulieu (illustrated by the talented Len Peralta). But here’s the thing: practically the whole cast of MST3K was there in the front row, and I spoke to them. I asked Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank) when they would be available for autographs (I had brought my Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie DVD to the convention for that purpose), and I spoke briefly to Beaulieu when he signed my copy of the book (I said something inane; he said something polite).

But something was off somehow. I realized, later, after they stopped taking questions right when it was my turn, what it was:

These people are not my friends.

This may seem obvious to you, and yes, it is, really. I never thought they were my friends. But I felt that they were, and so I was, for reasons that were not immediately obvious to me, disappointed and a bit hurt when they did not seem as happy to see me as I was to see them. This was an emotional, not intellectual reaction, and it took a bit of reflection for me to realize the source of these feelings.

I am not one who is a “fan”, of shows or celebrities. I do not write them letters. I do not join fan clubs. I do not follow their real life exploits and send them congratulations when they have a baby or win an award. I do not defend or attack them in chat rooms.

But you have to understand: I have been going to sleep while Mystery Science Theater 3000 plays (originally on Comedy Central, and later on DVD after I discovered the Digital Archive Project) for nearly 20 years. Every night for between ten minutes and ninety minutes, Joel, Mike, Josh, Frank, Dr. Forrester, etc. have been entertaining me and helping me calm down from a stressful day and fall asleep. Naturally, I also watch it in the daytime, from time to time (but less frequently as the years go by). There is probably no one on earth in whose company I have spent more time, other than my spouse, than the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000. So while I know that these are just television shows, and that the people on screen are not real people, but simply characters played by actors, twenty years of familiarity with them had built up this emotional expectation. The realization that this emotional expectation was not realistic was … disappointing.

To be clear, I do not blame any of the MST3K alumni for treating me as a stranger. To them, that’s what I am. They weren’t rude or unkind.

But they are not my friends (although the real Trace Beaulieu seems like an interesting guy).

I never did get my DVD signed. I could have: it just did not seem worth the effort.

Oh, and my question would have been: “What projects are you working on, or have you worked on, that you wish more people knew about and paid attention to?”

Final thoughts

I am glad that we went to DragonCon, and I am grateful to OneBookShelf for picking up the tab for the trip. However, I feel no great desire to return. I dislike crowds, and as I said, I am not generally one to fawn over celebrities. Other than the celebrities and the short films, the rest of panels were essentially the same as one can find at any science fiction convention (such as RavenCon, where I am now the Programing Director). Add to that the fact that we had no one to hang out with, and would probably have no one were we to return, and there really isn’t any reason for us to attend DragonCon again.

Heh-heh. I just found a note I wrote myself the other day in between the Bill Corbett and Trace Beaulieu panels at DragonCon.

I am such a nerd. I just saw most of the MST3K luminaries. Paul Chapin, Kevin Murphy, and Mike Nelson were really the only ones missing. I shook Beaulieu’s hand three times. I overheard Bill Corbett and Joel Hodgson talking about last night’s steak dinner, and thought that was cool.

These are just people doing a job.  They aren’t superheroes. I need to take my starstruck-ness down a few notches.

I hope I get to talk to Josh Weinstein.

In case you missed the Lost series finale, here it is:

As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called “Douglas” to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness!

With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled?

Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?

I picked up the TV series “Invasion” on DVD at Kroger, from a bargain bin. I am up to episode 5 or 6. This is a weird show.

There is clearly an alien invasion going on, but it’s not clear that the aliens are even aware that they are aliens. I had always assumed that pod people would know that they are pod people. But what if they didn’t know?

What if you were a pod person, and didn’t know it? What if you just felt… off, somehow?

It appears that the Digital Rights Mafia and the media robber barons have successfully done in Britain what they failed to do in the USA in 2003 — bullied the broadcasters into allowing the robber barons to control not only the content, but the devices used to play that content.

In my latest Guardian column, “Why did Ofcom back down over DRM at the BBC?” I look at how lamentably credulous both the BBC and its UK regulator, Ofcom, have been in accepting US media’ giants threats to boycott the Beeb if it doesn’t add digital rights management to its broadcasts. The BBC is publicly funded, and it is supposed to be acting in the public interest: but crippling British TV sets in response for demands from offshore media barons is no way to do this — and the threats the studios have made are wildly improbable. When the content companies lost their bid to add DRM to American TV, they made exactly the same threats, and then promptly caved and went on allowing their material to be broadcast without any technical restrictions.

How they rattled their sabers and promised a boycott of HD that would destroy America’s chances for an analogue switchoff. For example, the MPAA’s CTO, Fritz Attaway, said that “high-value content will migrate away” from telly without DRM.

Viacom added: “[i]f a broadcast flag is not implemented and enforced by Summer 2003, Viacom’s CBS Television Network will not provide any programming in high definition for the 2003-2004 television season.”

One by one, the big entertainment companies – and sporting giants like the baseball and American football leagues – promised that without the Broadcast Flag, they would take their balls and go home.

So what happened? Did they make good on their threats? Did they go to their shareholders and explain that the reason they weren’t broadcasting anything this year is because the government wouldn’t let them control TVs?

No. They broadcast. They continue to broadcast today, with no DRM.

They were full of it. They did not make good on their threats. They didn’t boycott.

They caved.

Why did Ofcom back down over DRM at the BBC?

(From New column: Why is Ofcom ready to allow BBC DRM?, Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com

What the hell has happened to the once-great Britain? They gave us the foundations of our society — the rights of free men to bear arms, the rights of a jury to decide not only if a law was broken, but whether that law should be enforced at all, and the basic right of the governed to expect their government to treat them justly… all of this is due to our country’s British origins.

I have to say, I am a little disappointed with what’s become of them.

On October 2, 1959, the first episode aired of what would turn out to be a seminal work of science-fiction television. For the first time the famous four-note musical motif played, and for the first time Rod Serling told viewers that they were “entering a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” Yes, it may be hard to believe, but today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of The Twilight Zone.

The first episode, titled “Where Is Everybody?” and starring Earl Holliman, was written by Serling and very much set the tone for the series: Holliman plays a man, dressed in an Air Force jumpsuit, who wanders about a town that seems to have no other people in it, though has evidence of very recent habitation (food on the stove, burning cigarettes in ashtrays, etc.). It turns out (SPOILER ALERT) that he is imagining the whole thing, and that he’s actually been put in isolation to see if he can stay sane for a trip to the moon.

It’s safe to say that every science-fiction TV series since owes something to The Twilight Zone: in the fall of 1959, even “Doctor Who” and “The Outer Limits” were four years away from their premieres. Serling proved that science-fiction had a place on television. Many of the episodes may be obvious, even trite; but there are many excellent ones. Some have become classics, such as “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “To Serve Man,” and “Time Enough at Last.” And who will ever forget that most-deadpan-voice-ever style of Serling’s?

A substantial number of the show’s episodes are available for free online (for viewers in the U.S., at least), and we at GeekDad encourage you to celebrate today by watching a few of them. That’s a signpost up ahead. Your next stop: The Twilight Zone!

(from The Twilight Zone turns 50)

Dave Howe, president of the Sci Fi Channel, does not understand or like science fiction and has contempt for the people who do.

In the most recent absurd move by the Science Fiction Channel, Howe has decided to change the name of the channel to “SyFy”. If you are rolling your eyes and saying, “What the …?”, you are not alone. In Mr. Howe’s words, “What we love about this is we hopefully get the best of both worlds. We’ll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we’ll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand.” In other words, “I don’t have a clue what science fiction is or why anyone would want to watch it. So rather than try and appeal to that market, we are changing the name of the channel to something nonsensical and hoping that will somehow improve our ratings.”

In making this idiotic change, Mr. Howe is following in the footsteps of Tim Brooks, who helped launch the Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network. “We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.” In other words, “I have no idea why I was given the job to start a science fiction channel. I don’t like it, and I like the people who watch it even less.”

What’s next? Will the Pope be put in charge of Planned Parenthood? Will Sarah Brady be put in charge of Gun Owners Of America? Will Iran be elected to participate in the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women?

I intend to mock anyone using “SyFy” with all of the sarcasm I can muster.

I love Lawrence Lessig. He is one of a tiny handful of clueful people that actually gets some attention from the media. If only lawmakers paid attention.