The Future Now

I like a lot of M. Night's movies.

HOWEVER, The Happening is a BAD MOVIE. It is LAUGHABLY bad. The direction, the dialogue, the plot, and the acting are all BAD. It's essentially a Sci-Fi Original Movie that could afford a B-List cast instead of a D-list one. Oh MY GOD.

I restrained myself from laughing at just how bad it was JUST IN CASE some of the other people in the theatre were enjoying it and taking it seriously.

I'm even leaving this post public just to warn others about.

You Are 50% Hare Brained, 50% Bird Brained

The hare side of your brain controls procrastination ability, inattention to detail, and stubborness. Hare brained people are good at communication and persuading themselves. If you're hare brained, you are likely average at math and logic. Your hare brain prefers carrots, reading, and smials. The bird side of your brain is all about running away and eating worms. Daring and dipsy, bird-brained people see the world in their unique way. If you're bird-brained, you likely have a talent for plucking molting feathers and watching TV. Your bird brain prefers nesting, philosophy, and bungee-jumping.

Why can I not find a Steampunk Toilet Paper Stand?

Please disregard our earlier report about the even earlier report being flawed. It wasn't a significant flaw and the detractors of the earliest report were, perhaps, being naughty.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074.pdf

The NASA climate study that revealed that we've been suffering from a spate of record-busting years of high temperatures had a Y2K bug. . .

http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm

So we're still trending pretty hot, but 1934 was hotter.

As I've spent the last two days looking at houses, I'll now write about the TV I watched last week:

Chuck: Figured I'd hate it. Lame concept. Unrealistic computer crap. But (1) it's actually funny and (2) it's got Adam Baldwin in it. So I'll watch it for a while at least.

Pushing Daisies: From Bryan Fuller. Very stylistic. They got some casting wrong, I think. I predict cancellation within four episodes. We could use more fairy tale stories on TV though. And that's what this is: told as a fairy tale.

Bionic Woman: Figured I'd love it. And I did love parts of it. The appearances and cameos from BSG players, for instance. Other parts. . . less so. This wasn't a finalized version. . . some VFX shots were missing, and I doubt they music they used in one fight scene is final (it fits, but TV shows tend not to use THAT music).

A common theme in Chuck and Bionic Woman has to do with some cultural changes we've gone through in the last little while, I think. I think I can talk about it here without giving too much away. What we've got are the little guys realizing that they've got power and they can tell the big organizations what to do on their terms. I'm wondering if it's not a reflection of the way employees no longer stay with a company for thirty years and then retire. Instead, they shift from one company to the next, looking for the best deal and the best environment. The talent rules all, and it's being reflected in these shows. This is very different from what we had in. . . geez. . . The Invisible Man comes in off the top of my head, that sad little Sci-Fi Original programming show. We are no longer the little replaceable cogs in the corporate machine. We have self-determination and choose where we wish to fit in.

Someone's screwin' around:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=470579&in_page_id=1770
I don't know whether they're alien or human pranksters, but I'm thinking that if you've got advanced technology to zip around like a hummingbird on crack, you could turn off the gosh-darned lights if you wanted. So clearly they wanted to be seen and stir up a ruckus.

Um. Well, I saw it last night, paying full price since I was too sleepy at 10am to get see it then. It actually sold out at 8:15 when I was going to see it (yes, on the 2nd week of release in a theatre with it on 4 screens), so I sat around for the 8:45 screening.

I know that some of my friends really enjoyed it. So I won't rant about it too much here. I'll just post a link to Vern's AICN review of it. While I don't agree with all his points, I agree with a good many of them.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33228

Because everyone loves newly discovered species that resemble a cross-breeding experiment between an octopus and a squid!
http://starbulletin.com/2007/07/05/news/story03.html

The penultimate episode of Studio 60 aired last night. It's still a fine show in and of itself. Throughout the season, I was really hoping for more of the struggle to air Quality TV, but the show seems to really enmesh itself in huge arcs not related to that. I mean, counting next week's finale, the show will have been stuck on the SAME night for five episodes. I feel like I'm watching 24. Granted, there are some flashbacks to when Matt and Danny got fired the first time, but they could easily all be compressed into a single episode. The rest is just melodramamine. I'm fine with it being cancelled now.

in other tv news from the last week. . .

Jewel Staite will be a regular on Atlantis next season. Yay!

There's a new show on BBC1 called "Jekyll." Impressive first episode. Heck, impressive first 4 minutes!

We got some answers to Torchwood puzzlers from last week's Doctor Who. Including some of my own gripes with the change in Jack's character. So that was fun. Boo, of course, to rumors of Davies closing down the show after next season.

Yes, it's early. but the first Democrat primary presidential debate takes place tonight on MSNBC down yonder in South Carolina. It'll also be streaming on politico.com. Starts at 7 EDT, ends at 8:30. Giving each of the 8 candidates 11.25 minutes to talk if the moderators don't say anything at all.

I don't have high hopes for this one, but my current theoretical favorite is Bill Richardson. He may turn out to be just another politician though, and I'm interested in finding out before I get too invested (a year and a half before the final election).

Good progress toward simulating mouse brains:
http://www.openthefuture.com/2007/04/the_early_signs_of_the_long_to.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8

8 out of 10 of these things from the 1993 "You Will" AT&T commercials are pretty common now. . . go AT&T.

I'm currently reviewing paleo-future's feature on AT&T's other 1993 predictions. . .

http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/04/connections-at-vision-of-future-part-6.html

The blogger makes a comment on how buying a wedding dress is the last piece of clothing you'd want to buy online. But my fiancee did!

I think Tim Minear may finally have created a show that'll last longer than 6 episodes before being cancelled.

Of course, _Drive_ is no _Wonderfalls_ nor _The Inside_. It's its own Prison Break/24 style ensemble multi-plot line action serial. Which might explain why FOX is billing it as such.

Drive premeires Sunday night in the US with 2 hours and then has another hour Monday night. The first two have already aired in Canada on CTV.

One of the most delightful parts of the show for a fan-boy like me is that the actor who played the bounty hunter Jubal Early in the "Objects in Space" episode of _Firefly_ played a cop at the beginning of the first hour. He doesn't show up again by the end of hour #2, but I think there's room for him to show up again. He's got such a lovely voice and cadence.

Nathan Fillion and Amy Acker, our other Whedon-veterans were also good. Fillion does such a wonderful job delivering the dryest funny lines.

Ultimately, the show is not the work of genius I was hoping for. But I think Minear might finally get a full-season order!

I've said it before. No doubt I'll be saying it again many times in the future.

Some comic books simply do not belong in live-action form.

The Fantastic Four is a great example. Far too goofy and over the top to be live-action. And yet, yes, I will be going to see the sequel. . . in the cheap theatre. Maybe. I still haven't seen Ghost Rider (currently at the cheap theatre).

Shazam/Captain Marvel is another great comic what shouldn't be a movie! Yes, yes, the Shazam Action Hour with Captain Marvel and Isis from the 70s was a masterpiece -- of 70's cheese! I'd watch it over and over again, but just for the camp! And yet there's someone out there writing an adaptation for the big screen.

The Green Goblin is someone else that's hard to transfer. I came out of Raimi's first Spiderman movie impressed that Willem Defoe did such a great job with such a face-obscuring mask. But in my *memory* what I get is "jeezus, now _The Last Temptation of Christ_ and _Tom and Viv_ will never be the same." The Spiderman bits were great. The guy flying around on a jetski with a goofy green mask on?

But then again, Raimi is not averse to some camp. Which is why I'm not sure how he's ended up directing Sandman and Venom (let alone Harry's GG) in Spiderman 3. Doc Oc was great, but I can see Sandman being played a bit too over the top in Raimi's universe (Anyone see Jack Of All Trades? Cleopatro 2525? MANTIS????)

But I have great hope that he'll play it cool like in Spiderman 2.

If you assume that the faun was in her imagination, then what, really, is this movie about? Pointlessness?

If we're meant to believe that the faun was real and only she could see it, then there's a smidgeon more hope in there. But there's exactly one piece of evidence that might support that - and one is a very small number of points and easily written off as coincidence.

Naturally, the first thing I think of when I hear about hexagonal weather patterns on another planet is: extra-terrestrials!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17816192/

So, new strain of TB in South Africa, kills 98% of the people who get it in 2 weeks, people are NOT yet being forcibly quarantined, and I've seen ZERO mainstream media coverage of this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1996612,00.html

How can this not be more important than Scary SARS was?

(1) the Apple iPhone, although running OS X, will NOT allow any third party apps to be installed. Gah!

(2) AppleTV doesn't record tv and only seems to play/stream ipod formatted video. bleh!

I now see what people mean about Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field. I've seen it in other people before. . . now I've seen it first hand (I guess read live blogs reports is second hand, actually) in him. Alas.

I've started the habit of watching Steve Job's speeches as 'events.' So I sit here at my PC and watch hit refresh every so often while watching a couple of sites blog live from the event, waiting for something new. Last speech, nothing much -- just a bunch of new Intel Macs. This time? Wow.

The new iPhone really looks like something you expect from the future. It's long, it's sleek, (I bet it's screen scratches really easily!), it looks like a futurephone. It runs a real operating system (OSX), it's got a real browser (Safari), and it's got real storage (4 or 8GB), it's a video ipod, an audio i-pod, a phone, and a 2MP camera which is likely better in quality than the one on my Treo (hard to get worse color quality, really).

Of course, I've got huge qualms with it:

(1) I'm not a big fan of iTunes terms-of-use (which change your rights to your music AFTER you buy it).

(2) It's Cingular-only, whereas I think Sprint's Fair-And-Flexible plans are the only ethical cell phone plans out there.

(3) And, as is a problem with many Macs, ONE BUTTON! I mean, yes, it's got a touchscreen, but touchscreens don't provide tactile feedback. I -enjoy- using my Treo's 5-way buttons to be able to dial my fiancee without looking at the phone (or saying anything into it) -- four buttons clicks (three of them the same button in a row!) and we're there. And I can dial my business partners with 5 or 6! So, as much as Steve Jobs says they've got a ton of patents and they'll be defending them, I look forward to the iPhone Clone that gives me some real buttons.

But apart from those three things, this is a pretty amazing piece of design. I'm impressed.

And AppleTV. I know this was announced in some form months ago, but it looks pretty good. And I'd get one, so long as it would stream whatever video I want, not just iTunes video, and if it would record TV and download TV listings free from the Internet without a subscription fee. But if it doesn't do that (and there was no mention of it doing that), then I'm not so sure. Also, 720p is a bit paltry, though I understand the limitations of streaming hi-def over wifi.