Category Archives: Television

Why Didn’t Blu-Ray Take Over the World?

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There was a battle over dvd standards a few years back that was similar to the fight between VHS and Beta Max a decade or so even earlier. Sony had released their Blu-Ray player, and Toshiba had invented a rival called HD DVD. On the surface, the upcoming battle didn’t really seem all that significant (DVDs were still working fine), but Sony was about to release its Playstation 3 with a Blu-Ray player, and Toshiba was putting its HD DVD into the new XBox 360, made by Microsoft. So, the battle waged.

Strangely enough, even though the XBox 360 was the stronger seller (Sony dropped the ball and took way too long to release the Playstation 3), in the end, enough movie companies fell into Sony’s camp, and the Blu-Ray player eventually defeated the HD DVD format, becoming the only survivor. I don’t even think you can find an HD DVD movie anymore.

Yet, for some reason, even though Blu-Ray beat HD DVD, it still has yet to surpass DVD as the standard way of releasing new content for movies, TV shows and computer games. Instead, there has been an almost rebirth of the normal DVD player, the Blu-Ray remaining a higher end product but with an inability to maintain its dominance based on superiority alone.

And it is superior to DVD. In all ways. If you put a DVD player next to a Blu-Ray player and play them both at the same time, it’s obvious which one is better. But is that enough to make a difference?

You see, a couple of other things are going on that made the move to Blu-Ray not happen. First, Blu-Rays never replaced DVDs when it comes to price. In order to be the replacement, the price needs to be set at what people are willing to pay for movies and TV shows. For an average movie, there was a set price that people were willing to pay, and this came from years of establishing that market. Blu-Rays are almost always much more expensive. This was supposed to change over time as they took over the market, in that the prices would come down to match what DVDs used to be, so that they would effectively replace them. But that never happened. Instead, if you paid $19 for a DVD, you were always paying $29-35 for a Blu-Ray. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, it is when it comes to the economics of how DVD entertainment was expected. As long as Blu-Rays remained higher in price, it was always going to be seen as an exclusive item, and more of a luxury.

Blank Blu-Ray dvd prices never came down. They’re really expensive. A colleague pointed out to me that a dvd with the actual movie on it is sometimes cheaper than a blank Blu-Ray dvd. As long as that’s the case, you’re never going to get full adoption of the product. Plus, the players are still very expensive. It’s a no go all the way through.

One problem that Blu-Rays have that you never had with dvds is that you often have to make firmware upgrades. People don’t like that. Sorry. When they’re forced to keep updating their software for their dvd player, they get annoyed. With a dvd player, they don’t have to do it. Chances are pretty good, they’re not going to switch. When many dvd players are not connected online, you have even more of a problem.

The last point is probably the most important for the current situation. Blu-Rays needed to be the replacement for dvds, but instead we’re quickly moving online to streaming technology. People don’t even need dvds anymore, and if they see that as the obvious future, the replacement of the dvd is almost dead on a arrival. The thought was that people would pay more money for better quality, but instead streaming has gone the opposite direction, where people are willing to take less quality with more convenience. With that trade off, you might see why Blu-Rays might never take over the world.

It’s a great technology, but it may have been brought in too late to replace the model that was already going to be replaced by something different. Not necessarily better, but more convenient. Unfortunately, not always does the obvious successor become the winner.

Twitter: The Technology Everyone Uses Yet So Many People Hate

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Recently, I’ve gotten into the whole Twitter thing. Before that, I was strictly a blog guy who swore he would never really get into Twitter. But a few years back, I opened up a Twitter account because I’ve always been one of those “well, everyone else is doing it, so I should, too” kind of guys. Like most people who join Twitter, I followed a few people, waited for the throngs to follow me, realized no one was going to follow me and then just stopped using it. I figured, like so many other people do, that it obviously doesn’t work because it wasn’t working for me.

Yet, since then, a few nations, including Egypt, collapsed because of the use of Twitter. No matter how I tried to ignore the story, it was HUGE, and the fact that this strange technology was used to bring down a powerful dictator really was hard to pretend it wasn’t this massively large elephant in the corner, practically taking up the whole room. So, recently, I decided I would go back into the technology to see if maybe I might have been missing something.

What I have discovered is that there’s a lot of very interesting information that gets shared on Twitter, but you have to be patient to realize it. If you go into the game with the thought that you’re going to get instant satisfaction or quick results, you don’t understand Twitter. And I didn’t understand it. Now that I’ve started to follow a bunch of people, I’m starting to realize that it’s a pretty interesting way to view the world. Therefore, I’ve decided to give some advice to those of you who may be thinking about getting into it yourself.

1. Follow people you are really interested in knowing more about. This is really important because one of the mistakes I was making was trying to “sell” me and then getting people to start following me. It rarely happens. It actually looks desperate, and who wants to follow someone who is the equivalent of the loser in a bar trying to pick up on anything that walks in? No one does. However, what I did start to discover is that because I’m a writer, and I’m interested in all things writing, I’m going to find a lot of interesting people to follow who actually might have useful information. You also quickly discover who is just there to use it as a marketing tool and who is there to use it as a communication vehicle. Some writing Twitterers I followed, like Publisher’s Weekly, have interesting information they share with their followers. Others, which I won’t name cause this isn’t really a “diss” kind of article, weren’t all that helpful and turned out to be really annoying more than anything else. The hardest thing I found myself having to do was unfollow someone, but sometimes, you need to just because the amount of spam that someone clutters up your channel with can be overwhelming, especially when it’s not helpful.

2. Some people are on Twitter because their egos need to be checked. A lot of celebrity Twitterers are like that, and it’s unfortunate. But it also tells you a little more about them and lets you realize that you’re probably better off avoiding them. One person I started following in the beginning was Felicia Day, who is the creator of the series The Guild. She doesn’t Twit that often, but when she does, it’s usually interesting and worth following. About half of what she has to say is interesting. Mindy Kaling, however, who is the girl who plays the Indian girl on The Office, I thought would be interesting and funny to follow. Personally, she’s not. I found her attempts at humor to be really attempts to try too hard to be cool, and pretty soon I’m probably going to unfollow her. An interesting celebrity I’ve been following has been Wil Wheaton, who is the man who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven’t come to a decision on him so far, as I’m suspecting he’s still looking for validation, as I noticed when some of the senior members of the Star Trek franchise were twittering and left him out, and he actually made a bit of an appeal last night, practically begging for attention. He’s an interesting case because he tends to float between a Felicia Day (interesting to follow) and Mindy Kaling (not worth the time). So the jury’s still out on him. However, it should be pointed out that if you’re hoping to be followed by a celebrity, or even have one actually pay attention to anything you write in response, it rarely happens. I used some of my best funny material in responses to Felicia Day, and I was pretty much ignored, which is probably no different than it would have been had I met her in public. Unfortunately, the lowly among us remain lowly.

3. If your goal is lots of marketing potential, then yes Twitter is a great tool to use, but you’re going to have to put in a lot of work and a lot of time before it ever pays off. If you spam your messages into the channel, people will dump you in a heartbeat, which means you have to use the technology to actually communicate. And like most avenues of communication, if you’re only projecting and not listening, people stop listening to you. Granted, the celebrities still get attention because they’re celebrities, but the average person, like me, is only really going to get attention as long as he has something interesting to say. So if you’re just there to build followers, you’re going to have a hard time unless you can provide something interesting to say. I started off with very few followers, and slowly, I’m building a bit of a following, but I’m not fooling myself into believing I’ve somehow tapped into the Duane-amaniacs. Therefore, I have to make sure that what I have to say is as interesting to me as it is to them, kind of like regular writing is. People avoid spam and really want something interesting to read. Otherwise, why follow you?

4. The social implications of Twitter are huge and have already proven themselves to be excellent. Like Egypt discovered, Twitter gives the average person a voice he or she might never have had before. When people were looking for information about Egypt and the revolution, well, that was an audience just waiting to hear what had to be said. Twitter was perfect for that. What happens to that Twitter audience now is probably even more interesting, but I doubt too many people will study that as researchers always look for that pivotal event, not the continued ramifications of a pivotal event that has run through its play in the media.

5. The complainers and the critics. There was an interesting article today on CNN’s site about the 5 ways Twitter changed how we communicate. What was even more interesting were the comments from the readers. Most of them were from what I like to call the old grandfather who lives in the house that no kid likes to go near, constantly yelling, “damn kids, get off my lawn!” Rather than read the article and be interested in the new technology, the haters showed up and posted responses like Shawn777: “Twitter? I don’t even use that crap” and Guest119 ‘s “200 years from now, provided humanity doesn’t blow itself up with nukes, Twitter will not even be a footnote in tech history.” My personal spin on this is that the majority of the complainers are people who tried it out on a weekend, didn’t get a million followers and then figured it was a dead technology.

6. What is the future of Twitter? Who knows? Certainly not me. I’m pretty late getting on the bandwagon as it is anyway. I do know that somewhere down the line another technology will replace it and be the next “in” thing. I’ll probably be late for that one, too. But right now, Twitter is serving as an interesting way to communicate, and as a writer and a communications professor, it’s hard for me to continue to ignore it.

For the record, if interested, follow me on twitter at DuaneGundrum.

We Seem to be Running Out of Good Television Shows

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Recently, I was looking for a good television show to watch on dvd. That’s kind of how I roll these days, watching dvd television series rather than original programming when it actually airs. What I’ve discovered is that everytime I watch a series that’s currently on, they cancel it. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how good it is, it happens to me all of the time. I mean, everyone has their complaint about the demise of Firefly, which was a great show for its time, but every other show under the sun as well gets canceled by today’s television networks. I started watching Star Trek Enterprise. Canceled. Watched The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Canceled. Jericho. Gone. Jeremiah. Gone before I even knew it. It seems no matter what I watch, it gets canceled.

I guess I could watch stupid shows like Two and a Half Men, but as much as I enjoy poking out my eyes with a spork, I just can’t watch that kind of garbage. An example is the sister show of that garbage one I just mentioned, Big Bang Theory. I bought the first three seasons of it for a pretty good deal at Best Buy, mainly because colleagues at work kept telling how funny it was. I think I chuckled every four episodes, and I finished watching the third season last night. Was not very impressed. It was like someone heard that geeks were funny, didn’t know anything about geeks and then wrote an entire series around what he “thought” geeks might be like if they were actually funny. Throw in a bunch of comic book references and various Star Wars/Star Trek-isms, and that’s pretty much the show. Oh, of course, you have to throw in a few hot females to exacerbate the whole idea that “geeks can’t get hot women” and then we’ve pretty much finished the triad of doom. Like I said, it had its moments of interesting jokes, but overall I keep wondering what happened to that last few weeks of my life. If I went with the premise of the show, it wouldn’t make a difference because geeks don’t have any worthwhile lives anyway, but let’s just say I’m not buyiing their nulled hypothesis.

Which leaves me searching through the Netflix queue hoping to find something, ANYTHING, to watch. I was in Best Buy the other day (when I bought the dvds for Big Bang Theory), and I noticed that Felicia Day‘s 4th Season of The Guild was out on dvd. I kind of wish I would have bought it then, but it was only 82 minutes, and I had been planning to spend a lot more time with a show. Should have bought it then. In case you’re not aware, Day’s series is a brilliant commentary of how actually to do geek humor, as it really gets it right and tells it from the perspective of people who ARE the geeks, in this case a guild of online gamers who have no other lives but the game. It’s completely believable and funny. An interesting ironic point is that one of the recurring characters (who showed up in the third season) is Wil Wheaton, the man who played Wesley Crusher when he was growing into adulthood. What makes it ironic is that he’s also a recurring character in Big Bang Theory, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that the few times he was in the show (as Sheldon’s arch enemy because he once showed up the main star of the series for a comic book convention signing) were the few times where I actually found myself enjoyiing the show. In those occurrences, Wheaton played essentially himself as a crass asshole of a person who may or may not actually be a lot like the actor himself, which surprisingly is not offputting, even though you would think it would be.

Unfortunately, I find myself unable to really find any great shows on television anymore. I sat down and watched on Netflix streaming the three seasons of Kyle XY, which was so much like so many other shows it was attempting to steal ideas from, like Roswell, the X-Files and even Buffy. So, until I find something decent, I’m kind of stuck waiting for Smallville to run out its final season before I’m left with nothing but these four empty walls of nothiness where my stuffed animals and I will finally realize we have very little to say to each other and lots of times to say it.

What it All Comes Down to

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I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.

Watching the Right Television Shows to Come up with the Right Political Answers

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The current state of these United States of America shows us not very united in the states of America. It’s pretty sad because for the last two hundred and some years, we’ve weathered some pretty strong storms that should have only made us that much stronger. You know the old line of “whatever doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger” which ironically is the only thing I have left from the woman I once loved named Marisha; it used to be her favorite line for reasons that are neither important nor all that interesting. Well, that line isn’t working anymore. We seem to be much more about divisive politics than any concept of working together for a better solution.

George Washington is the one on the right

The political writer, Morris Fiorina once wrote a brilliant book called Divided Government. In this book, he argues against common sense in that he shows through statistical examples that when our government has been divided, we’ve actually accomplished more in Congress than when we’ve been under united government. Unfortunately, his analysis wasn’t forward thinking enough to project what might happen when divided government becomes an unworkable government, when the divisions between both sides might turn out to be the destruction of government, rather than the process that allows time for “cool and deliberate reflection,” a concept once deemed that would lead to the “real voice of the American people” by George Washington in a letter to Henry Knox on September 20, 1795. Right now, we’re in a weird political process that is completely destructive and causes very smart people to act petty and stupid. When looking for leadership, which is what people do when surrounded by annoying destructionists, we’re finding all of our leaders have become ten year old children who think that pointing at the other kids and saying “he did it” is somehow what America is looking for in its leaders.

If one were to look for allusions and metaphors to explain what is going on today, I can find no better example than that of television, which is often referred to as either the “idiot box” or the mind-numbing device that causes people to stop thinking. Why should we be surprised that what we’re receiving from our leaders is nothing less than the ridiculousness that comes from stupid television shows anyway? Unfortunately, the metaphors that make sense indicate that we’re watching the wrong television shows in hopes of finding some kind of mechanism to lead us to a better tomorrow.

Right now, we seem to have leaders who have latched onto some of the worst television metaphors to dictate the types of actions they are emulating in our government. If you watch any type of television news, like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, basically all you’re getting from commentators and pundits is analysis that sounds like Howard Cosell or John Madden describing some kind of football game where players are trying to create brand new plays by doing stuff that people have been doing for decades, yet seem to think that it’s all original. During the election, it was like watching professional wrestling, where oversized behemoths yelled “I’m going to get you, Hulk-man!” as they rip off their t-shirts and promised bloodshed of the like never seen before. But we have seen it. It’s called bad politics, and it leads to bad government and horrible representation. What these types of metaphors really show us is that our leaders are playing another zero sum game with each other where no one actually wins because each side is only focused on winning, not on what they get out of winning in the first place.

I’m going to include another television reference that can explain where we need to be going and how we should be looking at our current political dilemma. Before I do so, I apologize because I’m going to be calling on my geek nerd credentials to do so. But in the end, it will be worth it, so stick with me on this. I promise. It will be worth it.

The show I’m referring to is one that was developed by J. Michael Straczynski called Babylon 5. Without getting into all sorts of geeky crap about the show, I’m mainly interested in one of the races that was developed during the series, called the Minbari, a race of balding aliens who were also deeply spiritual. What made them significant in the show was that they were running around the galaxy for thousands of years before humans took to space, so they had a lot more time to really mess things up. Their government was run by a 9-member council that was made up of 3 members from the religious caste, 3 from the warrior caste and 3 from the workers’ caste. During the seires, the Minbari ended up in a civil war between the two more powerful castes, the religious and warrior. Why I’m discussing them is because their spiritual leader realizes at the end of their war (and the way to solve it) is that the religious and warrior castes had completely forgotten the most important caste to their civilization: the workers’ caste, the one that created all of their ships and buildings and was the one caste that suffered the most during the war fought between the two vying for power. As a result of this realization, their leader then elevated the workers’ caste to more positions on the council so that they would then be the dominant caste from that point forward.

These aliens didn't get along either, so their people ended up killing each other. Nuff said.

We have the same problem right now. We have two political parties who are fighting amongst themselves for power in our government, yet the ones suffering the most are the workers, the common citizens who don’t actually have a seat at the table, yet are the ones who are victimized by whatever decisions the two political parties make in their name. But these two parties have stopped being representative of the people a long time ago and now only really represent themselves, but claim to represent everyone else. But they do so in name only. Look at the events that have transpired over the last decade and that should be readily apparent to everyone. We’re fighting two wars that were picked by people in power who cared zero for what the common person thought about these wars. Yet the people fighting these wars are the common folk who make up the entire organization of the military that has no voice in the decisions the government makes for them. During this last election, the people were angry and spoke by using the only voice they have (the ballot box) and threw a whole bunch of people out of office because they haven’t been listening but speaking rather than listening. So a new group of people are now moving into office, and they don’t seem to get it either. Rather than realize the people sent them to Washington to get things done, their leadership thinks the people sent them to Washington to continue fighting with the government and again, getting nothing done.

So, let’s look at this from a different angle and treat government as a hospice where our goal is to treat the situation as triage. Perhaps if we look at it that way, we might realize what needs to be done to fix this problem. But I suspect that even with such an easy allusion, they still won’t get it. Or they just won’t listen. They’re pretty good at not doing that. But this triage is a blueprint to what people actually want done, even though I realize no one is interested in actually listening to the people. Think of this triage as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where we take care of our basic needs first and then work our way up to actualized desires once our struggle to survive is taken care of.

1. Our people need jobs. That’s been hurting us from day one. This means that the first thought should be to getting people to work. This doesn’t mean fast food jobs or retail jobs. We are a post-industrial nation that has a high-end technologically driven citizenry. This means that we need manufacturing jobs that develop high-end concept materials, like electronics, medical needs and computerized knowledge. This means government needs to help these types of industries grow and grow in our own country, not by farming out the manufacturing to third-world countries so only executives of these countries have jobs. We’ve done enough outsourcing as it is. We need stabilized positions in this country, which requires a serious focus on technological education for a workforce that has grown stagnant in building 20th century technology that is now being taken care of elsewhere. We need to focus on the 21st century and beyond by satisfying that market in a way that only our workers can do it. That means constantly being at the forefront of these markets like we used to do back in the early part of the 1900s with the previous markets of technology.

2. Once jobs are stabilized, we need to focus on making sure that people have money to spend. I’ll let you in on a little secret that government right now has no clue about (because they certainly don’t seem to get it). People don’t care about the budget. Politicians and government wonks do, but the average person doesn’t care about the budget. What the average person cares about is that the government doesn’t keep taking more of what they bring home from the jobs that they do have. This means that this whole budget mess that Obama, the Republicans and the suddenly backbone finding Democrats are fighting over is pissing off the average American. Right now, those out of work are about to lose their unemployment benefits that were about to be stretched out further. The fighting means they will now receive nothing. That pissed off a lot of people who still can’t find jobs (see number one). The second plank of the problem is the Bush Tax Cuts. People don’t really care that the rich are getting them, too. They only care that when January comes around they don’t end up paying hundreds of dollars more in taxes that they weren’t paying before. If you want to piss off the bulk of the American people, let those tax cuts expire.

This is the wrong time for the Democrats to suddenly rise up against their own president. They somehow think that people are going to believe they’re now on their side because they want to punish rich people. The average American isn’t going to agree with that. He or she is only going to see a smaller paycheck and then be really pissed off at the government. If you want to lose any mandate you think you have, that’s going to do it.

3. People want to see their government getting along. They don’t care that one side wins over the other. Most Americans aren’t that tied to the fight that they care. When they are suffering and see infighting, they see a system that doesn’t work. That makes them go nuts during elections, kind of like the last one. If nothing happens as we move towards the next election, people are going to revolt again. And when they start to realize that revolting doesn’t actually change anything, they’re left with one of two choices: Ignore it and become apathetic, or revolt the way people have done historically. That second choice seems like such a wild card that no one in government believes it will ever happen. Almost every revolution that destroyed a previous government came from nowhere and happened almost overnight. NO ONE sees it coming. And that’s what makes them so scary. So, continue to ignore the problems and hope they’ll go away, or do something about it.

What that means is our government representatives need to start looking at how to govern rather than how to zing the other side. If that doesn’t change, our government probably will. Just not as anyone wants, because changes of that magnitude rarely turn out as anyone actually wants.

Why Television is Failing So Much These Days

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Networks really don’t want to admit this, but they’re losing big time in the ratings wars. Oh, they’ll acknowledge it by saying really stupid things like, “we have to compete with so many other sources, like computer games, Xboxes and cable” but what they’re really not admitting is that they’ve so lost the pulse of America that they may never gain it back. The reason they don’t want to admit that they’re failing big time is that everyone who works for the networks realizes that his or her job is on the line if someone higher up realizes how incompetent they really are. So, instead of admitting it and fixing it, they’ll go on pretending that the emperor has no clothes and hope no one notices either.

Well, I’m going to put forth a couple of problems and solutions, and then we can kind of figure out if the networks are ever going to get any better.

1. The Hiatus. One of the biggest mistakes the networks could ever make is to start up a new show that starts to gain the attention of the public and then SUDDENLY yank it off the air for three or four months, and then let it reappear again. If there was a number one stupid thing to do so you could derail any chance at succeeding in ratings THIS  it is.

The origins of this stupid idea quite possibly came as a result of the infamous writer’s strike that halted all production for a period of time right in the middle of a brand new season. As a result, some really promising shows got canceled prematurely because they didn’t even get a first half of a season to gain popularity. They were pulled off the air during the strike and then never brought back.

Now, I could see this as one of those once in a lifetime situations, but somehow the networks thought this was a really good idea to subject viewers to a gap in time right in the middle of a show, as if this would cause them to come rushing back to that show, because they’ve been waiting and anticipating its return. This is supposedly what happened with LOST. But because it worked for LOST, they tried it with every other stupid show they aired. They did it with Heroes, and then Heroes went completely downhill. Then they did it with every other shows as well. SyFy became famous for doing this (even though it’s not a major network), and it is quite possibly the reason for the destruction of Caprica. Caprica was a somewhat decent show, but they cut it right in the middle of its first season so that people just stopped caring about the show. Then the second half came, and well, no one cared. So it got canceled.

That’s the problem right there. If you give us a new show and then halt it in the middle of the very first season, don’t expect us to come back. Sorry, but you lose.

2. Remake Hell. There’s a reason some shows were canceled the first time around. They failed. Remaking a failed show from yesterday may sound like a daring idea, but all it does is show that your network has no creativity whatsoever. Hawaii 5-0 might sound like a great idea, and I’m kind of liking the idea of seeing Grace Park in a bikini once a week, but to be honest, Hawaii 5-00 wasn’t all that great a show back then. I’m not all that excited about it now. So, I don’t watch it. And when others get over the fresh car smell, they probably won’t either. And that’s the most popular of the remake shows to have been done. Imagine what happens to the ones that aren’t as popular. The show V sounds like a neat idea, but it’s been done before. Even though some of the actors on the show are all from a Best of Sci Fi of all time (watching the cast is like watching a recap of who was once great in sci fi), it’s very hard to get past the fact that almost nothing in this show is original. And then they put it into half season hiatus (see complaint Number 1), which means they’re going to be seriously struggling to maintain an audience. And when they cancel it on us, they’ll blame us for not wanting to watch it.

3. No Faith in a Network. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the networks. I generally don’t watch a new television show any more until it reaches the third season because I’m so tired of a show being canceled in the first or second season, right after I’ve gotten drawn into it. They did it to me with Harsh Realms (remember that one?), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Jericho, Jeremiah, Firefly, and Dollhouse. Why would I trust a network to actually continue a television show that I started to watch? It’s really not worth the effort until they’ve decided to reward us by actually continuing the show. But they won’t continue a show because none of us are watching it (maybe because we don’t believe you’ll continue it).

4. Rehashes of Overdone Formulas. How many Law & Order or CSI franchises can we create? As a matter of fact, do we really need another cop show of any sorts? At one point, I was getting paranoid while living in San Francisco because there were more cops on television from San Francisco than there were actual cops on the streets. I was scared to walk to the corner because on TV there was a crime happening every fifteen seconds in San Francisco. And I knew not to call a cop because they were all basket cases who were having problems dealing with their sanity (or ex-cops who were scared of their own shadows…thanks, Monk). Recently, there was a show with a guy who played a drugged out mafioso in New Jersey who was now a cop in Detroit. I was starting to wonder who I could trust anymore. I mean, I’m kind of scared just now writing about it. But stop giving us more stupid cop shows. There’s not as much crime in the world as there is on television. Stop scaring the crap out of us.

5. Bad writing. This is probably my biggest complaint these days. The Event stopped being an event for me because the writing was straight out atrocious. And then they backed it up with some of the worst acting since Pauly Shore decided to make serious movies. Or maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a recurring fear I have. But either way, the writing is awful on some of these shows. I remember watching an episode of The Chase (or is it just Chase?), and three times in a row I was able to blurt out the next line of dialogue word for word before the actor could say it. And these were the “gotcha” moments that cop shows have where the hero gets to say the cool thing to the guy who is setting him or her up for a big dramatic moment. The writing was so bad that it was badly predictable.

That, in short, is why I find network television these days to be suffering. If they want to really compete with the competition that’s up against them, they have to raise their game. But they can’t raise their game if they’re going to keep doing the stupid things they keep on doing.

“The Event” and “Chase” Leave a Lot to Be Desired

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I gave them both a try. I even continued watching both shows long after I thought they had seriously jumped sharks, shark tanks and the Atlantic Ocean. But nothing about these shows has caused me to think that they’re worth any further watching on my part. Last night’s airing of both is a good example.

The Event

The series started off with a bit of an overhyped dud and has managed to dog paddle its way through the rest of the season. In the very first episode, they presented us with “the event”, or at least what I think was supposed to be the event. A plane was hurtling towards the president, and then out of nowhere it vanished. The next week, the plane reappeared in the desert. Then secret police/military helicopters showed up and may have slaughtered everyone. And then the bodies woke up. And then the bodies were now all prisoners wondering what happened. My writing of this makes it sound a lot more exciting than it really was. To be honest, it’s been extremely boring, accented with huge moments that generally don’t make any sense. And I don’t mean “doesn’t make any sense in a LOST sort of way”. It’s more a “doesn’t make sense in a Cop Rock (remember that show?) sort of way”. Nothing the show has done has caused me to really think: “I can’t wait to see how they pull this off” or “I wonder what’s going to happen next.” Instead, it’s been more like “I really can’t wait until they go to a commercial so I can do something constructive like check email for a spam message I’m hoping to receive.”

Last night’s episode was par for the course. Let me explain. The main actor, who is Jason Ritter, the son of John Ritter, attempted to act his way out of a paper bag in which he showed his range of “I’m in a panic mode cause I’m looking for my girlfriend” and “I’m in anger mode because I’m looking for my girlfriend.” Unfortunately, in the previous episode, he found his girlfriend, so his acting range has no purpose right now, as “I found my girlfriend, so I’m now going to act all frantic for no reason is hopefully not going to be noticed by the audience.”

And that’s a huge part of the problem with the show right there. The acting is atrocious. And I mean ALL of the acting. At first, I thought it was because they had really bad actors, but there are some pretty decent actors here who are doing some seriously horrendous acting, which to me means their director sucks because even bad actors can’t act this badly. An example: One of the main recurring actors is D.B. Sweeney who has done some great things in the past. He was in a show with Terry O’Quinn, the bald guy who plays Locke in LOST, called Harsh Realms, where he played the buddy of the main character, and he was really good in this part. When I saw he was now in The Event, I was actually thinking, wow, they got a good actor, mainly because I was seeing a lot of bad acting. They’ve done nothing great with him, and as a matter of fact, his acting is pretty crappy in this show as well, which immediately tells me that the director seriously sucks.

Another example was the appearance of Paula Malcomson, who plays, well, to be honest, I haven’t a clue who she was playing because I was having a seriously hard time paying attention when she finally appeared. Malcomson is the actress who plays Amanda Graystone in Caprica, who probably has one of the most nuanced parts in television these days on that show. In The Event, they decided that because she was a “serious” actress, they were going to let her show her talents at being completely nuts and off the wall. She puts on a 40 or so second rant that was basically best described as “bad actress overacting”. I half expected the two other actors in the scene to respond with “Really?” because it was so over the top bad acting that I couldn’t imagine anyone else remaining in character for the rest of that scene. But fortunately, we was joined by Jason Ritter and the woman who plays the FBI agent, so the bad acting continued ensue and a good time was had by all.

Let’s move on with the story. In the last episode, they released the mysterious woman who won’t tell the president her secrets because of some strange terrorist demand that the government do so. So, she goes on the subway, drives around for a while and then ends up in a wannabe Starbucks, orders coffee, and then her fellow accomplice throws off a tracking device placed in her food (and now in her) by mixing a similar tracking device in the creamer of the coffee so that soon 50 something people are walking around with the tracking device. And then the good/bad guy working with her ends up beating up one of his fellow FBI agents, burying him in the trunk of his car and then radioing the bad guy holding everyone hostage that he needs to come in.

So, they all move in on a huge warehouse where the bad guy is holding out. Fortunately, the government just so happens to see the mysterious woman walk in through the front door of the warehouse with a CC camera at the last second before she disappears behind the door. So an FBI crack team of guys in military uniforms with FBI blazened on the back of their jackets rush into the building to catch the big bad, mean terrorist. I say this because this leads to a typical police raid drama that should have required the writers and director to have actually watched a typical police raid drama some time  in the past because it has to be the biggest joke of a raid I’ve ever seen. First off, it had to be the slowest raid physically possible. After the crack team breaks through the front door, they waddle forward in as slow a manner as physically possible so that we end up with at least two commercial breaks before they get about fifteen feet past the front door. Before they even get that fifteen feet in, the executives of the FBI then come crashing in behind them. You can tell the executives because they’re the ones that don’t wear any protective gear other than a flack vest, but all have three piece suits, minus the jacket, because somewhere in Hollywood land some informed them that cops look much cooler with the dress shirt, flack vest and hand gun attire than with full body armor and machine guns like the rest of the guys were wearing.

So, in all of this time they’re raiding, the bad guys get away by crawling into a hole in a drain that’s located in the room next to the one where the ten thousand crack soldiers are breaking into their warehouse. And then, and this was my favorite part of the episode, he activates some mysterious glowing bomb and the double agent guy from before decides to sacrifice his life (even though he can get away just by stepping into the drain opening about two feet away from him) because somewhere down the line he had to give up a girl he fell in love with because being an alien (did I mention he was one of the aliens?) he would never age, and well, we learned from watching years of Highlander that you just can’t do that to a woman. But back to the great moment of television history: The President of the United States is watching the invasion over the CC camera, which for some reason is relaying the image in full HD television, and focused directly on the door where the FBI agents busted in. And then, for no apparent reason, the CC camera switches to a full view of the warehouse, and we watch it implode on itself. And all I’m left wondering is: Who the hell switched the camera angle, how did he know to do it at that time, and where did that new image come from? Unfortunately, those questions won’t be answered by The Event because they were stupid mistakes in creating the show, not mysteries within the show itself.

When the episode ended, I was almost comatose and thankful it ended. And then I watched the lead-in for The Chase.

The Chase

One of the stupidest shows I’ve seen in years. It involves a female US Marshal who apprehends fugitives. For some reason, they’ve made her out to be a chance-taking, thrill-seeking agent who risks her life constantly. In the beginning of this episode, she gets angry at one of her agents who doesn’t risk his life jumping onto a boat that might have three armed fugitives on it. Her second in command plays the Will Riker character of her conscience, who tends to try to keep her grounded.

What bothers me about the show is that it takes every cliche of Hollywood and uses it as if it’s brand new. Last night, there were three separate dialogue moments where a character said something, and I responded out loud with exactly what was going to be the zinger of a response. And word for word, I was right each time. I’m not kidding either.

The villains are cartoonish and way over the top. I kind of wondered where they would even imagine such people really existed. Even the bar in Mos Eisley didn’t have a cesspool of villainy like the ones that occur in Chase. Sometimes, I find myself rooting for the bad guys, just in hopes that the death of the US Marshals on the show might cause the show to never appear again on network television.

Both shows have been picked up for finishing out their season, but I imagine that is only because NBC has nothing better planned. It has done everything possible to hype the crap out of The Event, but it’s really not worth the effort. The only thing going for it is that it comes on right after Chuck, which is a great television show, even when it’s not at its best. Unfortunately, everything following Chuck makes me realize how nice it is that I own books that I can read instead.

Smallville–Supergirl episode misses mark on its target demographic

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First off, the latest episode of Smallville was interesting. The emphasis of the episode was that Clark needs to prove himself, or something like that, and that only Kara, his cousin is capable of doing so, so she reveals herself as Supergirl (not the name she uses) and pretty much has herself targeted instead of the future Superman.

Some immediate comments: It was great seeing the actress who plays Kara back again. It’s also kind of cool that they touched on the fact that Clark still can’t fly, and for a second he did…right before crashing down and burning. Oh well. Baby steps.

The problem with the episode is more in what they were trying to do than it what they did. There’s always been a freakish element to the show that I think is inherent in the people who develop the show. A couple of times they’ve gone with the whole leather aspect of the superhero costumed characters just cause it was kind of hot and innovative. Not to mention that all of the actors/actresses are hot as well, so it makes sense that they take advantage of their best attributes.

Last season, they went the fetish route with an attempt to create a false superhero identity for Lois Lane, in that her character was named Stilleto, and she dressed in black leather, in a sort of catwomanish costume with black stilletos. It was pretty obvious that they were going the full nines in attempting to make her fetishy hot. And they succeeded. They even threw in a few S&M jokes as well to even out the look.

This episode they went the full monty, so to speak. The main villain for the episode was followed to an S&M bar by Lois, who then dresses up as a dominatrix so she can get into a scene with the guy and then blackmail him into giving up his vendetta for the Blur (Superman/Clark). There was the obligatory scene where Lois walks through the dungeon atmosphere and people are doing all sorts of freakish things while pounding music is playing in the background. Then she puts the guy in handcuffs, pours hot wax on his chest and then elicits two hot women who help her take photos of the guy in bondage. Then she uses the photos to ruin the guy’s credibility.

Okay, here’s the complaint I have. First off, if they’re interested in appealing to the fetish crowd, which is the only reason you do in your face bondage sorts of scenes in a network television show, well, you’re going to get that crowd interested in your show. You’re not going to get the Bible thumping crowd, so you have already decided on your audience appeal. Well, then your next move should not be to try to discredit that same crowd by showing that once you reveal the photos, you’ve discredited your character. In other words, you can’t show the scenes, expect to excite your audience and then turn around and tell your audience that it’s not acceptable behavior. If you do, you’ve basically pissed off every potential audience member you could ever hope to attract. The Bible thumpers are going to hate you for going all fetishy, and the fetish crowd is going to hate you for going all moralistic and anti-fetish. Basically, you lose on all counts.

The whole CW thing lately has been to be as innovative, fetishy and sexually-aware as possible, and that’s great. But if you’re going to do it, go all the way. I don’t mean show nudity or go nuts with the sexual content, but at least show that if your emphasis is to show it, don’t ridicule it as well.

Having hung with that crowd for some time now, I find the ridicule from mainstream television to be really counter-productive because it’s been no secret that a lot of creative types are into all sorts of interesting persuasions (or lifestyles). As such, they find themselves having to sneak it into mainstream material and then pretending that it’s just innovative but vanilla at the same time. Well, it’s not. And unfortunately, they’re never going to convince the mainstream people who hate them that they should embrace them, so either go all the way with it and be proud, or don’t do it. Save it for people and innovators who are willing to take a risk and a chance with the idea. Otherwise, you force it right back into the closet again, because if the people who really believe in it aren’t willing to back it up, then who will?

One of the interesting things about Buffy when it was on the air was that it was never scared to just “go there”. It never apologized for it, and it went on with life like everything was normal when they did go there, and they did go there enough times to cause people in those communities to really appreciate it. I think that’s what the CW wants to do, but they’re too frightened to do so. Instead, they keep sniping from the shadows, hidden in closets and hoping that people will think they’re innovative so that they can sneak out and wave their pistachio banners for everyone to see. But that’s never going to happen as long as they keep hiding in shadows.

Not the greatest episode, but there’s a lot of promise there for the future. Here’s hoping they continue to try to innovate without hiding behind their intentions.

Stargate Universe is Back–Intervention

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Well, the second season of Stargate Universe has premiered. For those who may have been following my blog, or had conversations with me about this show, you know that I haven’t been the greatest fan of the first season. First off, I love Stargate, and by that I mean both of the previous series Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis. So I had a lot of hope for this show because I loved all things Stargate. But the first season was so flawed in so many different ways. The acting was all right, probably the only positive they had, but the writing was atrocious, and it was like they were just phoning in the whole thing. I never saw so many “let’s solve a huge conflict by going to a commercial and then coming back as if everything was solved off screen” moments in a show before. It was becoming a joke of what it could actually be.

So, when they left us with a cliffhanger for the end of Season One, I half expected them to come back and resolve the whole thing by some act of the gods that wouldn’t make any more sense than the rest of the episodes. But fortunately, they didn’t. Surprisingly, the first episode was not bad. But then, true to form, they went back to stupid resolution processes that keep causing me to pull out the few hairs I have left on my head.

The episode started out with a stand-off between the bad guys of the Lucian Alliance and the crew of the Destiny, the ship that has been the headquarters of this third installment of the Stargate enterprise (no, not that Enterprise). Anyway, the bad guy Varro ends up being a not so bad guy and saves the crew from being slaughtered but marooned on some desolute planet instead (geez, what a pal, eh?), and then he gets marooned, too, for going against the new crazy leader who takes over after Kiva dies from a gunshot during a gunfight with Colonel Telford, who also was shot in the stomach during the exchange. Anyway, the upshot is that the Lucian Alliance guys become all bad ass like and threaten to kill everyone, but Rush does a double cross, like he always does, and manages to play chicken with the Lucian guys by threatening to let some pulsar kill most of the people on board, except for where Rush and a few stragglers are holding up.

Meanwhile, TJ, who was pregnant last time we checked, and shot when Varro went nuts trying to, well, I really still don’t understand what he was trying to do when he started fighting his own people and grabbing for a machine gun that managed to kill everyone, including Elmo who was innocently recording his show at a nearby soundstage next door to the Stargate set, ended up on some planet they had been to before where they left half the civilian crew. Some aliens brought her there and it ends up being one of those situations where she’s kind of there and not there, but she’s going to be sent back, but her baby has to stay. That’s the deal. Or agreement. Or whatever. So TJ comes back, realizes that she lost her baby, because everyone on the ship thinks that she actually lost it on the ship, but in reality it’s living happily on some strange planet out in the Gamma Quadrant, or wherever it is they were.

So, here’s my thoughts. The show had some interesting action and character dilemmas. The Sergeant Grier character is becoming one of the most fascinating characters of all. He’s twisted, an asshole, but he’s so freaking loyal to Colonel Young that you have to just admire the man in his own violent way. Plus, the actor plays this character so well. I mean, I hate the character big time, but at the same time he grows on you in a pretty fascinating way.

The baby thing with TJ is completely understandable, although cowardly writing, in my opinion. They felt they had to get rid of the pregnancy, and I really think the decision was made to avoid having a baby they had to keep working with on the series each and every episode, because you know it would be that important if she had to keep it. It would be a constant set of episodes where her one defining line would be: “I have to protect my baby!” And honestly, I want to see her character grow without having to fall into such an old Hollywood, phoned in sort of characterization.

The Lucian Alliance guys bring an interesting dynamic because now we have a whole bunch of new characters who are now on the ship. Sure, they’re in lock-up right now, but you know they can’t stay there. They’re either going to be integrated into the crew, a la “the Maquis” from Star Trek Voyager, or they’re going to become further adversaries. Plus, one or two new actors might get pulled from them to become regulars, and some of them were actually pretty good, including the woman who takes over as their leader at the end. Unfortunately, they’re previous female leader died, and she could have been a fascinating character to build upon for the show.

They introduced the alien race (the one that saves TJ and keeps her baby) again, which means that they may have a much larger focus in the series. If not, they’re a bad plot save device. I’m hoping there’s something more going on because they hint that they’ve been paying attention to the Destiny crew and only jumped in when they had to do something to save TJ from death (she was dying from the gunshot would in the crazy machine gun spray by Varro’s bizarre heroics).

Rush is becoming a very conflicted character now. Before, he was trying to take the Destiny. Now, he’s sort of on the side of the good guys, so who knows where his loyalities and his motivations will lie for the future. I don’t think they ever really played out the end of the conflict between Rush and Young. Saying they’ll work together “for the sake of the crew” is okay, but logic dictates that there should have to be more to it than that.

Complaints: They’re still doing the last minute saves by Deus Ex Machima, and that’s getting on my nerves. Grier and Lt Scott were in one of those no win situations where they were stuck outside the ship, unable to get to a hatch to get back in before the pulsar hit. Even the annoying kid Eli couldn’t save them, so they were presumed dead. Then out of the blue they are safe, and they state that they were lucky enough to be shielded from the pulsar by where they were located. OH GREAT! No, that’s stupid. Don’t set up an imminent death moment and then say, oh we were saved because the pulsar just barely missed us, letting all of this happen off camera. This is continuously bad writing, and I was hoping they had fired all of those bad writers from the first season.

Unfortunately, those types of writing moments are what continue to bring down what can be a good show, because the season premiere was not bad. I enjoyed it. I just need them to be a bit more consistent and realize that the audience is not a bunch of teenagers who are constantly fooled by coin tricks.

Overall, I’m hoping this is a sign of better things to come this season, and even with reservations, I’m going to continue watching…for now.

Storms, power outages, and putting it all into some kind of perspective

Memoirs, Television, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

Last night, I was sitting down to watch the season finale of Warehouse 13. It’s a quirky show that I’ve learned to like, and I was looking forward to see how they handled the final character arc they were playing out. Ten minutes into it, the cable provider’s satellite message appeared instead of the signal and indicated that it was having trouble connecting. Ten minutes after that, the message changed to “Acquiring Signal” and then suddenly all of the power went out.

So I sat in my apartment for fifteen minutes, thinking the power would eventually pop back on, but it never did. I found a flashlight to help me maneuver around the very dark apartment, and then figuring it was late enough, I went to bed.

The next morning, the power still was not on. Now, in the past I might have panicked and started thinking about all of the stuff in my fridge melting and going bad. But instead, I thought I get paid on Friday, and so what if I end up having to rebuy all of my groceries on that day. It’s not that big a deal.

Today’s a work day, so I got dressed in the pitch dark blackness and then went out to start my car. Well, I discovered a new problem: My garage door does not open without actual electricty. My garage is not attached to the apartment, so there was absolutely no way to get into it. My housing complex never bothered to include a key to the garage, so I realized I was not getting into my car. The housing complex’s manager’s office was also completely empty; apparently someone figured that with the power being off, it wasn’t a good deal to come into work on time. I guess they figured NO ONE would be interested in talking to the manager’s staff on a day when the entire complex was out of power. But oh well.

So I walked to the bus and took it to work. Haven’t done that in over a year, and it’s a very long walk to the bus, but I did it.

But all during this time I was walking, I examined the ramifications of the downed power grid. For about twenty minutes of walking, there was absolutely no power at all, although I did hear a generator working on one of the buildings. And then suddenly there were lights at about the twenty minute mark from where I lived. This area was not hit by the loss of power, or at least they had their power restored since it happened.

And this got me thinking about how little prepared so many people are for simple little hardships like this. I had a few flashlights in my apartment, so I was at least able to see. One of them burned out really fast, which told me that I had bought a pretty crappy flashlight. The others worked better, but it’s no fun finding out your flashlight is a cheap piece of crap when you need it most. It reminded me of some of those horror movies where someone’s in the dark, turns on her flashlight, and then a few seconds later it goes out. Makes the scene even scarier than if she never had light in the first place. But I digress.

What was interesting to me is that I’ve been through a few power outages over the years, including a few earthquakes that took place in California. And each one of those events caused me to prepare a little bit more for the next time. Each new scenario I came across made me feel a little bit more prepared for the next time, and that always felt good.

This time, I didn’t feel like I was really lacking all that much, and there was very little reason to panic. I did, however, hear quite a few muffled fights going on between couples and families in my apartment complex. This new entrance of events did not bode well for quite a few of them. And I wondered if this would cause them to be more prepared next time, or would it just cause them to complain a lot until things came back under normal, and then they’d be unprepared for next time as well. I don’t really know how they’ll handle it.

And that leaves me wondering about how well people are prepared for handling bad situations that they might come across. I know people have a tendency to go off like poffy hairdressers every time something doesn’t work out the way they planned, but what if something happens that occurs over a length of time? How do people handle that, and can they? I’ve been watching this BBC show “Survivors”, which is about a fictitious disaster that happens, leaving a small segment of the British population alive. It took place in the 1970s, but it was interesting how poignant those events were and how relevant they could be for today. If something happened that took away our sense of normalcy, how well would we handle ourselves? Would we live long and prosper (sorry, bad Vulcan humor) or would we end up panicking until we wasted away or died?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers to that. I’d like to think we’d never have to find out, but I fear that the answers aren’t ones I’d really like to hear.