Glen Weldon takes us through Batman’s history and evolution and how it was affected by the culture in which it was written. I knew bits and pieces of the story from other histories of comics, but this was the first time I’d read one focused on Batman. There are many ways to tell this story and I think Weldon’s is a very good strategy.
In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old computers just aren’t up to snuff when it comes to 720P and higher. I have a Roku 3 in the basement for running on the treadmill and that’s capable of handling higher quality video, but it’s not compatible with the way I’ve ripped my media. After a bit of investigation, it looked like Emby might be the right choice for me. So I installed it on the CentOS VM that runs my homeserver. The first thing I had to do to get it to work well was to change the Mono garbage collection.
Scarlett has become hardcore obsessed with the BBC show Octonauts. Nothing she used to care about - Mulan, My Little Pony, Beauty and the Beast - can be put on the television for her. All she wants to watch is Octonauts. So for Easter we got her all the characters. She has two favorite characters/toys: Shellington, a koala bear, and Kwazii, a cat descended from a long line of pirates. This is what Kwazii looks like:
Just in case you didn’t read it or watch the movie, each district has a fashion designer who designs the costume for its contestants representing the products the district produces. The narrator mentions that these fashion designers aren’t always creative. In the movie, the logging district girl is dressed like a tree. Then again, maybe Hunger Games was copying Miss Universe - I don’t watch beauty pageants. Either way I think the only way Miss Canada could have been more of a stereotype is if she had a jar of syrup in her other hand.
He’d have made Bee and Puppycat, Natasha Allegri’s latest surreal cartoon masterpiece. I think there’s something great about Allyn Rachel’s mumbling delivery that really sells it. I love this amazing world we have that allows for experimentation - I hope we don’t lose it through bungling of Net Neutrality issues. (I like eps 1 and 2 from the Kickstarter [second video] more than the pilot [first video])
I come in from raking the leaves and Scarlett is standing there with one remote in her hand and the other two in front of her. She’s pushing buttons and asks me, “Daddy, what button do I need to push to watch a video?” I told here there were a lot of buttons to push. “But which one do I push first?”
Last night I had a dream that combined Games of Thrones and Perl programming. Like it was in the GoT world, but we had to do some Perl programming to defeat the Lannisters.
Some things people don’t know because they weren’t taught. Or it was taught in a way that didn’t make sense to the way their brains work. Or it was beyond them for some reason. All of this is fine. It’s the prideful ignorance that is really wreaking havok with this country. The following Daily Show clip is what inspire this mini-rant:
Today’s post is facetious - I know the answer is that men and men’s desires control Hollywood. But, as I watch Game of Thrones, I end up seeing so many breasts and so much female pubic area that it just ends up making the ridiculous absence of penises pretty abundant. Especially in the scene in which a guy is purposely taunted to get hard ….. no wait…this happens twice and both times with bad results. One time, the dude’s penis gets cut off and the other time a leech is attached to it. Neither time is it shown. Yet during a scene at a whorehouse, we see an acrobatic girl essentially put her vagina right into the camera.
When you’re part of a dominant class you don’t realize how differently you see the world. Sure, I’m ethnically Hispanic and have suffered humiliation and financial consequences over one overt racist incident. But by and large the world is my oyster. I’m a man and racially I’m white. In fact I’ve had coworkers come to me and disparage Hispanics (all-to-often a codeword for Mexicans - especially Illegal Mexicans - in the USA) and then say, “they’re not like us white guys.” So for the most part I never saw anything awry with pop culture. In fact, one of the few times I realized consciously that I wasn’t actually represented on TV was when I did see myself represented on TV in the form of reruns of the TV show ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?. The show was exactly about me - it was about kids (although I think they were high school age or older) who were born in the USA to Cuban immigrants and whose grandparents only spoke Spanish. It was odd and fascinating and I couldn’t get enough of it. But other than that one year or so when I saw those reruns, I was able to identify with virtually any TV show. I could see myself as Chandler, Ross, or Joey in Friends. (Or as a character on Full House or Home Improvement) Now, I loved showed with African Americans like Hangin’ with Mr Cooper, Family Matters, The Cosby Show, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air so it’s not as though I needed to see myself in TV. But until I started poking around on the Internet as an adult I never realized that for people like African Americans, those four shows were almost the only opportunity they had to see themselves on TV (especially in a positive sense). And forget it if you’re Asian! (including Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) I came to realize that I had been as naive about the entertainment landscape as those white couples from the 1920s who use to take trips to Harlem on the weekend to experience the Jazz and other aspects of African American culture. At the end of the trip they could retreat to their comfortable lives while the African Americans were stuck there.
After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When I went to look for Monday’s episode on Tuesday, it wasn’t there. And Colbert didn’t appear to have any shows since mid-November. That tipped me off to check their websites and see that they did, indeed, have new episodes. Very disappointing. I don’t want to pay $200 for a device that works worse than a web browser on the shows that are important to me.
My wife enjoys watching TV a lot more than I do. I prefer interactive or creative pursuits like programming, photography, or video games. If, tomorrow, all the TV studios said we could no longer use the Internet to freely watch their programs (with ads, of course), I wouldn’t buy cable. Once I’d broken that shackle, it was gone forever. Even when I had Comcast and my MythTV, the hard drive was filling up with the shows I liked (Myth Busters, Dirty Jobs, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report) faster than I could watch them. But Danielle enjoys TV and I enjoy making my wife happy. So, when I read about the Boxee Box, I thought it might be something she’d enjoy.
I’m not often annoyed enough with mainstream news organizations to make a big deal out of it. Plenty of stuff they do annoys me, but I rarely get so charged up that I blog about it. Recently they stoked my fire when discussing the attempted terrorism on Times Square. Take, for example the following excerpt from a newspaper article: “The vehicle identification number was defaced, but detectives found it stamped on the engine block and axle to get a lead on the current owner.” (Alison Gendar - New York Daily News)
[caption id=“attachment_3359” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“South Park Cosplay (photo by heathbar on flickr)”] [/caption]
In the beginning I was not a huge fan of South Park. Of course, I never gave it a chance, but it didn’t give me a reason. It was, as the creators admitted in a recent Fresh Air interview, exceptionally crude both in its jokes and its scatological humor. I heard that basically it was just a bunch of elementary school kids using profanity – how novel. So I did other things with my time.
When I flew to Tampa last week, there was a magazine cover that claimed the days of free professional content over the Internet were over. The cable companies had a way, it claimed, to control the programs available and keep us paying >$100/month for cable. I didn’t read the article, but I have a guess at how they might do this. Comcast is currently attempting to buy NBC (if the Justice Department doesn’t have anything to say about that) and NBC has a stake in Hulu. So, Comcast could limit Hulu to existing cable customers or they could limit the content to make Hulu no longer that important. Already, changes are afoot that have made Hulu less attractive. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are no longer available via Hulu. Whether or not this is part of the same agenda (getting people to pay for cable) isn’t important. The less programming available in one place, the less important Hulu is. But if they succeed I will simply stop watching TV.
It’s been pretty ridiculous recently with Steele claiming to bring Urban cred to the Republican party. I think they feel like they have to have a black guy too. It’s just odd that suddenly after Obama’s President, they have a black chairman.
Well, I know that eventually Hulu will pull this clip. But until they do, enjoy the extremely creative editing of the The Colbert Report’s team in this rap battle between Colbert and Republican Chairman Michael Steele.
A lot of people have been warning that rules/laws that everyone considers stupid are a very dangerous thing. Essentially, what happens when every single person you know is a “criminal”? It begins to create a sense that rules are pointless and if everyone’s disobeying this rule, why not disobey that one and so on. These people see the current problems with copyright infringement as potentially being the catalyst to the end of civilized society. I’m not sure I would go that far by a long shot, but it is an interesting question.
There’ve been a lot of people recently on the MythTv mailing list talking about Boxee as a convenient way to was content on Hulu. However, the Boxee developers have blogged that Hulu has nixed that idea. ( And here’s Hulu’s side of the story) I read a bunch of comments as well as both of those blog posts (I also read this great blog post) and the only conclusion I can come up with is that the TV execs that license their content to Hulu are braindead. Here are the best reasons I read in the comments (summarized for brevity) :
The other day I was messing around with flickr’s slideshow feature and I came across this:
And here it is zoomed in:
This comes from an episode where the characters are discussing the founder of Springfield who uses the word Embiggen and some teachers debate whether it’s a real word. I love the way programmer put little homages into the code they work on.
Over the last few days I’ve been watching season 1 of the British version of The Office. I’ve come to the conclusion that to say, “the American The Office is based on the British The Office” is a gross understatement. For the first season, at least, it’s almost a 1:1 copy of the British version. Examples:
Both Dave and Michael Scott have a raunchy friend who teases him, but he thinks he’s in on the joke
Tim and Jim look almost exactly the same and react to the camera in almost the same way
the British Pam character is dating a guy from the warehouse who’s less than romantic
Both Dave and Michael Scott have a female boss who is much more competent than them
In both shows a temp is hired in the first few episodes and knows way more than the boss
In both shows Tim/Jim put Garrett/Dwight’s stapler in jello
in both shows the “kevin” character wants to be in a band
Both Garrettt/Dwight know karate and other such things
There are probably a few more similarities. I almost feel like I’m watching the first season of the American version again. There are a few differences, though, that make the American version more enjoyable to me. Jim and Pam have more chemistry and play more pranks. Of course, the American show has more episodes than the British one so there is more time for mischief-based shows. I like Dwight’s quirkiness more than Garrett’s. So far there isn’t an HR person that the boss in the British version hates and the animosity towards Toby made the show for me many times when the Jim/Pam love triangle was taking forever. Oh yeah, the British opening theme is SO British.
My father-in-law is over today and he’s been dying to watch the Bizarre Foods Paris episode. I’m opposed to buying video media off of iTunes because of the digital restrictions management (DRM). But, he’s been wanting to watch that episode forever and we no longer have cable so I can’t record it onto MythTV. We bought it off of iTunes and then tried to watch it in iTunes. It was skipping and stuttering worse than a Youtube video. It was reminding me of the old dialup days when the buffer would keep running out. Any TV show I have ever downloaded for free off the net has not had this problem - it has played flawlessly - even if it was an HD recording. So why should I pay $2 for a stuttering video when I could get it for free and have HD quality?? And I’m not the only one - I searched the web and 3 million pages came up on this issue. The solution was to play it in Quicktime, outside of iTunes. This is ridiculous - pay content should NEVER be worse quality than free content if you want people to pay. That is, after all, how the free market works.
This week was my last week with cable television. I’ve had it since I was around 12 years old or so. Now I’ve been on my own for a few years now and I noticed two things. One, I don’t watch much cable television. Just a few programs here and there. Two, it’s pretty expensive! It was $50 per month for just a few programs here and there. And now, it’s no longer necessary.
Got my Neuros OSD today via UPS! w00t w00t! I’ve been lusting after this since it was featured in Linux Format Magazine last month. (or was it two months ago?) I unpacked the contents and skimmed through the quick start guide. Then I hooked it up in my bedroom and connected it to the ethernet network.
They have a neat little opening animation about how Neuros is about open technology. Unlike other companies that build on open source technologies (I’m looking at you TiVo), the guys at Neuros Technology are proud of this and are using it to their advantage. In fact, they have a few Google Summer of Code projects working on improving the firmware - free engineering hours. That’s one of the benefits of open source. Another benefit is that someone like me (or, more likely, someone with lots of programming chops) can take the hardware they’ve developed and then tweak the code to make it do whatever they want.
Today I consider whether or not TV Stations as a distinct programming lineup have become obsolete. More or less since the beginning of commercial television there have been TV Stations to tune in to. (eg ABC, HBO, TNT) These stations create and broadcast original programming or buy the rights to broadcast programming created by others so that I can pick it up on my television. Every year they decide which television shows will play throughout the day for the next year. This show should play on Thursday at 2000 because that’s when such and such an age group will be watching. That show should be on at Monday at 2100 because otherwise it might have to compete with a show from another network. Some shows have nearly literally lived and died based on the timeslot they were shown in. Sometimes shows are moved around to follow other shows to benefit from the inertia of the viewers of the previous show to carry this one until it either proves itself or fails.
Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first I had to uninstall the previous nvidia drivers - they were neither automatically upgraded nor uninstalled) I started at about 1930 and was able to be completely up and running by 2055, just in time so that I didn’t have to missmy 2100 recording of “Best Week Ever”.
One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!
Joost recently (within the last couple of weeks) came out of Invitation-only beta. It’s a program developed by the same people who brought you Kazaa and Skype. Like those programs it also harnesses the power of peer to peer (P2P) technology. (Another reason for advocating net neutrality!) Joost is meant to replace cable TV and provide the viewer with programs on demand. There are a lot of other people trying to work on the same goals, but a key difference is that Joost actually has deal with content providers to legitimately provide content. Both The National Geographic Channel and Viacom Channels are available.
Recently, a coworker of mine showed me the website Hello Kitty Hell. This is a website created by someone who’s wife sells Hello Kitty items. If there is a young girl or, occasionally, woman in your life who is into the Hello Kitty Phenomenon, you doubtless know how much crap there is that can be branded with Hello Kitty and her various companions. Well, you probably haven’t seen many of THESE products. These are, as far as I know, REAL Hello Kitty items and all of them were featured on the Hello Kitty Hell website.
As you’ve no doubt heard, the US will be discontinuing Analog TV transmission in February 2009. They’ve actually already auctioned off the analog spectrum (and I’m not too happy about who ended up buying it, but that’s for another post). So, if you have cable TV you don’t need to worry about this and if you have satellite TV and you get local channels via satellite, you also don’t need to worry. If you currently get the nice, free, over the air (OTA) channels, then you need to worry - unless you have a new HDTV. But, for some reason, I don’t see the HDTV crowd overlapping with the OTA crowd. If you bought an HDTV, I assume it was to watch your cable or satellite provider’s HD sports package or HD HBO or HD Discovery Channel (which is beautiful, by the way). So you probably need a converter box.
On Hardball on MSNBC they were talking about Barack Obama’s poor bowling performance during his campaigning in Pennsylvania. One of their political commentators quipped, “Perhaps he should have stuck to shooting hoops.” I absolutely couldn’t believe they would say something like that on the news. And it wasn’t some random yahoo, it was someone that I’ve seen on MSNBC making political commentary in the past. If it matters in how you think of this, this commentator was white.
Today I was reading an article about protecting kids from seeing bad things on the Internet. The author pointed out that there’s bad enough stuff on Conservative Fox News and pointed to this link.
Well, almost. I got everything installed and configured for the remote to work. However, there are currently some buttons that don’t do anything - so I need to go into the config and get those buttons to do something. There are definitely some things that I need to program into the remove to get full functionality out of it. However, it’s pretty much done. If Danielle were to pick up the remote tomorrow, I think it would be self-explanatory how she would begin to watch live tv.
Well, I’ve have my MythTv box for about 24 hours now. I have figured out everything that was bugging me about the system except for the remote control. I hear this may require some compiling on my end. Not something I’m fond of, but I’ve done it before, so it shouldn’t be too bad.
So I went from not knowing what to record last night to now having 16 programs to record over the next two weeks. I’m not too worried about filling the drive because I can hold approximately 250 hours of programming before the hard drive gets full. Most of these episodes are things I would probably only watch once anyway, so I’ll probably be deleting them once I watch them.
I’ve wanted one for quite a few years now. I’ve really wanted one since I got my Jetway MiniQ case about 2 years ago - almost to the day. Now I finally got all the necessary parts today and put it together. If Jetway was still selling the MiniQ (it’s discontinued) I would DEFINITELY recommend AGAINST using them for a MythTV setup. The Hauppauge PVR-500 just barely fit in there. In fact, I had to move a badly placed capacitor slightly out of the way to fit the card in. I also had to remove the DVD burner (temp for the installation) and unplug the hard drive. But I finally got it up and running.
We’re on the edge of the largest disruption in Tv technology since color Tv became mainstream. In 2009 all analog television transmission will cease. Although the two terms tend to go hand-in-hand that doesn’t mean that all channels will become HD. There just isn’t the bandwidth for that in the cable pipes right now. But it does mean that soon nearly everyone’s Tv will be obsolete. Sure, the government plans to subsidize at least one converter box per household, but by-and-large everyone is going to need a new Tv; and a new Tivo….
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them.
If you don’t believe that illegal copying is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “prohibited copying” or “unauthorized copying” are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.” - rms on Piracy in Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth AvoidingPhoto by redjar on flickr, used under a Creative Commons License
I just discovered this show and it’s hilarious! It’s an HBO show about two Kiwis (guys from New Zealand) who are in a band and are trying to make it big in the US. If you like absurdist Tv shows like “Ally McBeal” or “Scrubs”, then you’ll love “Flight of the Conchords”. The band members routinely break into singing and end up in a music-video-like sequence. You have to see it to get an idea of the way it works.
This show is not very good, at least not based on the pilot. I’ll be shocked if people get into the show. Basically, it looks like the creators said, “How can we make a Tv show about race relations and not make it about race?” “I know, let’s make the non-whites be cavemen.” It’s so uncreative. So the show starts off with the cavemen watching the news and a caveman robs a liquor store. The others comment that it only makes the news when it’s a caveman. One of the main cavemen is dating a rich white girl. She invites him to a country club and they have a hard time getting in. People ask them if they should be catering or cutting the grass. It all seems pretty lame and unoriginal. If it were any other minority than cavemen, people would be saying, “do we really need this in 2007?” Sounds like something from the 1960s or 70s. But maybe I’m just being too harsh.
Let’s pretend I’m Joe College-Grad Consumer and I’m trying to evaluate how I should obtain my video content. I’m interested in watching shows as they come out - not later when they’re on box sets. Let’s see, I could buy my content on iTunes, Amazon Unbox, or some other such service. If I buy my content on iTunes I can watch it via iTunes or via my iPod. So if I have Linux, Haiku OS, or some other uncommon operating system I can’t watch it. Amazon does them one better and not even Mac users can watch it. If I have some other video jukebox than an iPod, I can’t watch my videos on the go. If I buy it via Amazon, I can’t even put it on my iPod. Both are riddled with DRM so if they decided to stop providing the service, I’m stuck with videos I can’t convert over to some new device. If I want to burn it to DVD to watch on my DVD player, I can’t. Oh yeah, and for some stupid reason, if I don’t live in the USA I can’t watch it until months or even years later.
The iPhone commercial shown tonight during the oscars was pretty sweet! It featured clips from a ton of movies where people said, “hello.” It revealed a June release date and, as far as I know, is the first commercial for the phone. Looks like they got the trademark thing settled with Cisco.
Democracy player is an interesting new type of video software which allows the user to subscribe to video feeds and have them automatically downloaded. One way to think of it is like a TiVo for internet videos. I’ll post some more after I get some experience with it, but if you want to go ahead an use it for my vimeo videos so that they go right to you, just click on the link below. I’ll also be adding a link to the side bar
I am against censorship. The recent news that Tom and Jerry will be edited in Europe to remove smoking scenes is absurd! So it’s not ok for Tom to smoke, but it’s ok for Jerry to electrocute him, chop him up, and all the other behaviours kids may imitate from watching cartoons. Even racist stuff has a place in our culture so that we can see what was acceptable back then, why it was acceptable and why it’s not acceptable today. I think it can be educational and also show how every immigrant group has gone through racist depictions in our multi-media. However, what I don’t like is unequal treatment people seem to give the different races and ethnic groups when it comes to apologizing. Here are two screenshots from the original Three Little Pigs.
I don’t usually blog about TV shows, but this Simpsons episode was so bad, there wasn’t even a point in the writers even trying. They should have just taken a week off and worked on a better show. The show started off on a funny note, although we’ve seen it before a few too many times. Bart was behaving badly and so Homer and Marge took him to therapy. This time they recommended having him play the drums. Above, they used this to create a really funny parody of the White Stripes video where the drums keep multiplying as they go on. However, things took a turn for the predictable and the episode went for a downturn when Bart ends up being picked up for a Jazz band and Lisa doesn’t. She gets jealous and, predictably, that is how we get the show back to the reset point. (meaning, as in every Simpsons episode, we have to get back to where we started so that the show doesn’t need to maintain continuity -except where it’s funny)
I read a book a few years ago called “Don’t Tell the Grownups” about how some authors hid their dangerous messages in the form of children’s book. As I was listening to some music from the cartoon Animaniacs, I also heard some hidden messages that the kids might not quite understand. For example, in a song where the Warner Brothers sing the names of the US Presidents, they end the song with, “…the one in charge is plain to see, it’s Clinton - first name Hilary.” So even in this kid’s show we see the joke that Hilary is in charge of the White House instead of Bill Clinton. This is pretty mild, but even more contentious is where Yakko sings all of the countries in the world. He mentions Taiwan as one of the countries. As we all know, we’re supposed to pretend that Taiwan is part of China when, for all intents and purposes, it is its own country in all but name. But here we are training kids that it is its own country - very interesting!
Football just gets in the way of the commercials I want to watch. So what did I do to kill time in between? I hacked Python, of course! I found a bit of humor in this, don’t know if you will if you haven’t taken CS classes.
> li
[‘a’, ‘b’, ’new’, ‘mpilgrim’, ‘z’, ’example’, ’new’, ‘False’]
> “False” in li
True
False is True! Kinda like turn left, right? hehe…
To sum up the opinion my wife and I have of the current cartoons out there for kids: they stink! The animation style is very strange and certain shows like Ed, Edd, and Eddy have a really strange palette. We pine for the cartoons of our youth. So we were very happy today to find out that, after three years of searching the web constantly, we found Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers Season 1 on sale at Best Buy. Part of the Disney Afternoon, Duck Tales was one of our favorite cartoons and represents the first time cartoons were taken seriously by studios. It kept me entertained for many a day as I sat and watched the degenerates of Duckburg try and bilk Scrooge McDuck out of his money. We’ve been watching the videos recently and the nostalgia is great! These DVDs are a must for anyone who grew up on the Disney Afternoon.
Today I read something that delighted me! On the back of the volume 2 DVD of Tom and Jerry it read “this dvd is intended for adult collectors and may contain material unsuitable for small children.” Why did it make me happy? Because it’s finally an admission that cartoons were not created originally created for children. Most of the cartoons played prior to movies with adult and/or family audiences. So I hate this sanitizing of cartoons that has been occuring on some of the box sets lately. Also, there were some cartoons which would never have been made into today’s PC world. But they WERE made and I think it is an important cultural history that we preserve these cartoons instead of putting them in the closet. We need to see these cartoons and understand why they are wrong and why they were ok back then. I think it’s important and the past can’t be changed, so don’t try to change the record! So I will enjoy this DVD more than I have enjoyed most recently.
Fanservice (or fan service) is a vaguely defined term used in visual media, particularly in the anime fandom (in Japanese, it is simply spoken as “service (saabisu)”), to refer to elements in a story that while potentially superfluous to a storyline, are designed to amuse or excite the audience. It is sometimes used in a derogatory manner when presented in a clumsy, pandering fashion or is the only thing notable about a series. Since it is extremely subjective, the most common uses are listed.
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