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080328 01:50 This is no April Fools

The news today are so weird (in the sense of really scary) that i keep thinking it's the 1st of April already and i'm being taken for a ride. Unending civil liberty violations, violent tribalism, superstition, corruption, slavery... wtf is going on?

• Anti-emo pogroms rage throughout Mexico
• Woman told to remove nipple rings for SoCal flight
• One million dollar bond set this week for man who conned $20 from store in 1990
• Iraqi astronomer goes on TV to explain why Earth is flat
• Sisters rescued from horrific circus sideshow
• State Department makes bank by outsourcing passport production to dodgy overseas contractors
• Sex offender ordered to keep warning signs on car and house

Someone tell me this is a joke. Please?

080328 00:33 TV

[Spoiler warning]

Thank you thank you thank you, Jericho, for ending it so well. Some excellent writing and everything tied up nicely. Highlights: the nod to Gerald McRaney's character, Beck coming around, Eric's not-losing-the-humanity speech. And while Jericho finally starts to breathe again, Jake gets to do the hero thing and fly a plane. Oh and count on the Texans to come riding in to start a war.

Thanks, Jericho, for ending it in the first place instead of leaving us with unresolved story arcs or a cliffhanger into nothing. Thanks for bringing it to a conclusion we can live with. The possibly coming civil war is another story.

...which makes it so abundantly clear why the show was cancelled. In a moral and economic crisis they don't want people to see stuff like that.

Wrapping up the story in only 7 episodes was not an easy task but executed well and probably not even such a bad idea. BBC series are usually 8-12 episodes. Keeps the narrative more succinct, gets rid of the soapy stuff and filler episodes, brings out the best in the writers.

There's life for Jericho still. I don't believe that the rumours of it being shopped around in search for a network to pick it up will come to much. But just like the Firefly community is still going strong, Jericho will be around for a long long time to come. I can see Major Beck becoming a favourite at conventions. Just watch the DVD sales. In fact, buy the DVD! Let's show them!

Here's some justified criticism of the last episode.

In related news: It's devastating... don't watch this program; it's not an easy ride.

080325 20:16 TV

Bye-bye Jericho.

I spent the last 3 days in a pumped adrenalin state rewatching the existing 28 episodes, gearing up to the final one that is on tonight. The Nuts Campaign brought it briefly back to life but couldn't save it all together.

This is a prime example of a show getting better and better as the story evolves. Sometimes story and characters have to be given time to develop, something that the network wasn't willing to do.

This show has grown from a slightly clunky soap opera to an irresistible thriller with a very science-fictional critique of a future corporate-dominated dystopia. [source]

I remember the first time i came across this corporations-replacing-governments theme. It was in Marge Piercy's 1991 novel Body of Glass. Scary but all too real already. Just consider how many public services are now privatized: health service, prison management, transportation, water, military... all run by corporations. It is not a far step to the world that Jericho shows us. Why wouldn't corporations seize this opportunity to become the government? No longer only 'in all but name'.

Here's an excellent review of the second-to-the-last episode.

080325 18:33 Society

There's a proposal to build a 5,000-foot high tower that will house one million people, which will be organised by floors into neighbourhoods with local governments and provide shopping malls and entertainment, so that you never really have to go outside anymore.

Sounds familiar? If you've played Simcity then you're already familiar with Arcologies. But something else that immediately popped into my mind was J.G.Ballard's 1977 novel High Rise. From the back of the book:

Within the concealing concrete of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of self-destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem.

Human society slips into violent reverse and the inhabitants, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.

High-Rise is a modern fable, a commentary on the hideous possibilities of advanced technology and the rat-like nature of trapped human beings...

080301 00:32 Comix

Warren Ellis' online comic, Freakangels, features some beautiful art work by Paul Duffield. Check out the rainbow in the first panel of page 5 of the most recent episode. And now go back and start reading at the beginning.

080229 23:49 Internet

I have a Rocketmail account that i set up in 1997! Rocketmail was the first web-based email, long before Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. In fact, Yahoo bought Rocketmail to start its own web-based email service. So, it's Yahoo now but my email address still reads @rocketmail.com. I'm proud of that.

080218 15:39 Web dev

HTML 5 has finally come up with a solution to a document structure problem i've been struggling with for years. I often mark up very long documents with headings and subheadings. Sometimes there's a subheading with several paragraphs within a text section. So far it was impossible to mark up a following paragraph as belonging not to the subheading but to the heading before that, e.g.

The fact that the last paragraph semantically belongs to header 1 can't be made clear in the mark-up. Sometimes a section is not finished when the subsection finishes, sometimes there's another paragraph whose content belongs under header 1. So how do you mark it up so that it isn't a paragraph within h2 but h1?

Here's how it will be done in HTML 5:

Other notables: <acronym> is deprecated in HTML 5, once and forever ending the acronym versus abbreviation wars, table mark-up is changing quite a bit, it seems, and, surprisingly, they're getting rid of 'accesskey'.

080217 18:27 TV

Some TV news again for a change. Jericho is back for its 7-episode second season - the breadcrumbs they are throwing to the fans after cancelling the show right after its season 1 cliffhanger (how stupid can you be?). Well, it's back and it's good, and it's a pity. They set up enough mystery and suspense in the first 2 episodes to cover another 3 seasons. No idea how they're going to resolve all that in the 5 episodes they got left.

I wasn't too sure about Jericho at first. I watched the pilot last year right after watching the Eureka pilot. Big mistake. After watching Eureka, which takes the piss out of SciFi quite a bit, i just didn't get it. Were they serious? Atombombs on american cities? For several episodes i waited for this to turn out to be joke. Instead it developed into a survivalist's wet dream. Once i understood that, i started enjoying it. Now i don't want it to stop.

No chance that any TV execs are reading this, but please don't kill Jericho - or Pushing Daisies while we're at it. Thanks.

And while on the subject, Summer Glau is horribly miscast as a robot in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. She's much more a constantly pouting doll. Not being allowed to act with her face is not doing her career any good. The Sarah Connor character of the serie's title is pretty much obsolete. Thomas Dekker steals the show with his 'Time to stop running. Time to be the hero i'm supposed to become.' attitude. They should have just called it The John Connor Chronicles.

080129 00:26 Movies

Some films are so iconic they should never be remade. The Omega Man is one of them. I'm not saying the new Will Smith - I am Legend - is bad. On the contrary. It's extremely scary and heavily emotional. And it's still close enough to the story (although they did actually shoot another ending, a happy end, which - thank heaven - they dropped for the movie release).

There are some major aspects missing, though. While in The Omega Man there was a cult, people with social structure and culture, and the underlying question whether these people don't have the same right to live and that Neville actually is the monster, there's nothing of that in the new film. The only hint we get is one of the zombie creatures obviously giving the orders. Otherwise it's brainless kamikaze beasts. (In the book by Richard Matheson they were vampires.)

So it lost some of its intelligence but it is still very watchable. Still, i wish they hadn't done it.

And i really hope they are going to leave Soylent Green alone.

080125 14:51 Environment

The term climate porn really pisses me off. There are people who have been warning about the effects of our treatment of the environment for decades, but now that it has finally become a topic that is generally acknowledged as true, thoses dedicated long-term activists are dismisses and ridiculed. The best example is Al Gore. You can say whatever you want about him but this is not a bandwagon he jumped onto when it became popular. He's been involved in the climate change debate for 3 decades and he's passionate about it. The expression climate porn is nothing but bad conscience and a way of getting back at those who can't stop themselves from smugly saying "We told you so!"

Here's the BBC programme covering the topic: One Planet: Climate Porn (podcast available for one week).

080118 15:50 Law

Amazon is breaking french law with its free shipping but they decided to pay the fine rather than drop the free delivery.

On one hand one could get enraged about companies with money being able to defy laws. On the other hand, if it wasn't for courageous civil disobedience stupid laws would never change.

080117 23:41 Disability

Did you know...?

It started as "night writing", a system of communication to be used by soldiers in trenches. But the soldiers couldn't understand it, the army rejected it, and night writing was adapted by Louis Braille, then a pupil at school for the blind in 19th century Paris. He simplified it into a system of six raised dots that can be used to represent letters and numbers. It's not a language but a way of reading and writing one. Despite initial difficulties - the teacher at Braille's school for the blind banned it at first - Braille is now used by millions of visually impaired people worldwide, in languages from Albanian to Zulu. Louis Braille, one of the most famous Frenchmen ever, is buried in the Pantheon in Paris, France, reserved for national heroes.

Found in COLORS Magazine 72 - Without Colors

080114 22:53 Entertainment

While the writers' strike continues (Just give them their money, I'm running out of stuff to watch. - heard on The SCiFi Guys Show), the Golden Globe ceremony was cancelled. So they unceremoniously announced the winners. Nothing to write home about, though.

080114 22:49 Darwin Award

The 2007 Darwin Award Winners have been announced.

Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.

080103 20:00 Technology

Excellent interview with Ray Kurzweil on BBC World Service's Culture Shock about the technological future, nanotech, the singularity, the human/tech merger. The interview is only available until next Monday (6th of Jan).

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