prolific.org

Fan-made docu of Mutant Enemy Strike Day. Great little interviews with fans, writers and actors.

Epi 19 in the Speechless video series.

Buffy and BSG writer Jane Espenson says:

“First off, is life in Jane Austen’s England any less
exotic and strange than life on Galactica or Serenity? But the real
parallel is a set of characters who seem completely fresh and real and
identifiable no matter how alien the world they’re inhabiting.

You know what current show I also see as having this quality? Friday
Night Lights. It’s a gorgeous show that consistently reminds me of
Battlestar Galactica and Firefly — it creates/reflects a real world
filled with lots of real and complex characters with consistent but
constantly-changing relationships, shot as if the camera just happened
to be catching slices of real lives… the fact that FNL is set in
small-town Texas instead of on a spaceship doesn’t matter one bit to
me. Both worlds are a little bit strange to me — what does it matter
that one requires artificial gravity and other artificial turf?”

That’s for every person I’ve met in my life who told me ‘Ugh, I don’t like SciFi, it’s not real.’ And for every person who isn’t watching Friday Night Lights or Battlestar Galactica, and should.

Psst… wanna see my new website?

Um… that’s ‘our’ new website. DAG Media bv, my employers, launched Zie.nl today.

Zie.nl is a new smart TV and web video guide, which makes use of collaborative filtering. Tips are presented in a flash application, the ‘kijkwolk’ (viewing cloud). Viewers can influence their personal cloud by voting thumbs up or thumbs down on individual programs. The engine tries to predict and present other shows a viewer might want to see, based on their voting and other behaviour on the site as well as some other stuff behind the scenes.

I’ve been part of the Zie.nl team since I started work at DAG Media back in September.

It’s all in Dutch, beta, but it’s live, baby.

(Zie is the Dutch word for ’see’)

Joss Whedon posts more about the writers’ strike:

“It’s necessary, though. We’re talking about story-telling, the most
basic human need. Food? That’s an animal need. Shelter? That’s a luxury
item that leads to social grouping, which leads directly to fancy
scarves. But human awareness is all about story-telling. The selective
narrative of your memory. The story of why the Sky Bully throws
lightning at you. From the first, stories, even unspoken, separated us
from the other, cooler beasts. And now we’re talking about the stories
that define our nation’s popular culture – a huge part of its identity.
These are the people that think those up. Working writers.”

In the meantime, Supernatural fans have followed Whedonesque’s lead.

More Whedony quotes:

“None of the writers – or anyone – I’ve spoken to have ever heard of
fans organizing and supporting a strike the way you guys have.
Supporting our right not to entertain you. Seriously, that’s rare.”

“When I showed my wife the banner that went with the pizza scheme, she
just said, “These people are gonna be running the world.” Man, I hope
she’s right.”

Probably the best news of the week (though in terms of geekiness perhaps Google’s OpenSocial thing kicks its ass) is Joss Whedon’s imminent return to television for the first time since the unfortunate demise of his Firefly series. Whedon ‘had lunch’ with Eliza Dushku (Faith in Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), to talk about her development deal with Fox – as friends do – went to the bathroom and came back with a fully fledged idea for a new series for her.

‘Dollhouse’ will feature Dushku as ‘Echo’ who is literally every person’s fantasy. An empty vessel who is filled with a personality and abilities to satisfy a customer in some way, then reset and formatted for a new assignment. Whedon’s old buddy Tim Minear (Angel) will be on the team too. Naturally, this all caused a bit of a storm on Whedonesque.com, with a large dollop of squee on top.

Fox have ordered seven episodes to be written and filmed. That doesn’t mean they’ll actually air, but we’re hopeful and can’t wait to have more Jossy goodness on our screen. Eager fans have already set up a website, forum, MySpace, Facebook and LiveJournal community for the series. Begrudgers are already putting money on the show’s early cancellation, seeing that once again, the network involved is Fox.

As for myself, I’m happy for those of us for whom comics don’t really cut it. I think this new series will be a kind of Dark Angel with better dialogue and better, well, everything and I am confident Whedon will once again manage to put together a wonderful supporting cast for what I hope will be another great ensemble show.

Watch it now before Fox cancels the world from underneath your bum.

Was the net slow for you yesterday? My transatlantic connection was completely throttled. It’s a wild guess, but it may have been the 140260 people torrenting the Season 2 premiere of Heroes combined with the 113347 breaking the law for Prison Break S3×02. And that’s just counting the ones listed on eztv.

I remember (cue string quartet) when you’d get pistol whipped for
including a 50 kb attachment and extradited for allowing HTML mail. And I’d be the one dishing out the punishments. Now
I’m hoovering a couple of Gigabytes per day and nobody bats an eyelid, least of all myself.

Are torrents clogging up our pipes? They may be, but that’s probably not the reason why CRIA (Canadian recording industry association) shut down the popular Demonoid tracker today.

I tried but couldn’t find any links to support the theory. I do remember reading reports some years back about bittorrents killing bandwidth.

… what are you watching? This season I’ll be checking out:

• Bionic Woman (S1 starts September 26. Eastender runs quite fast.)
• Cane (S1 starts September 25. Latino Dallas for the 21st century.)
• Chuck (S1 starts September 24. Nerd helps spies. Firefly’s Jayne co-stars)
• Dexter, starring Michael C. Hall (S2 starts September 30)
• Friday Night Lights, starring Kyle Chandler (S2 starts ?)
• House, starring Hugh Laurie (S4 starts September 25)
• Jericho (S2 will return as a mid-season replacement)
• Mad Men (S1 still on)
• Prison Break (S3 just started)
• The Office (S4 starts ?)
• Desperate Housewives (S4 starts September 30)
• Battlestar Galactica (S4 starts February 2008)

Good grief, where will I find the time? There’s also the Sarah Jane Aventures on the Beeb to check out.

Having just installed a new TV (the one I had, relatively new, died in an electrical surge that hit our house – it also killed my digital settop box), I ventured onto some local digital TV forums and was delighted to read that UPC will soon (this summer) be carrying NBC’s Sci-Fi channel. It’s going to be a localised version, so I don’t know what exactly they’ll be showing, but it’ll make me hang on to my digital subscription for sure.

Ah… more information:

In its opening month Sci-Fi will screen Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, New Battlestar Galactica, Tremors, Sliders and Dark Angel.
(source: Broadband TV News)

13th street isn’t sounding too bad either. Cracker!