One of the many perks of running Whedonesque.com, is…

Hang on. There aren’t a lot of perks, really, other than the pleasure of being boss of a site that’s well respected and much quoted. Yeah, we got invited to the Serenity premiere in Los Angeles. But I live in Amsterdam. Which means I never get to go to premieres, conventions, screenings or other meetings. When the Paley Center in New York invited us for a panel discussion on television and online fandom, one of the USA based mods got to go, but I could not. And unlike many of our members, I’ve never met any of the actors, or Joss.

All of this is perfectly fine with me. Yeah, I run the site, but I also run U2log.com and a couple of other sites. I’m not the biggest fan, I don’t keep up with all the news, I don’t know episode titles by heart, I couldn’t tell you which of the writers wrote what. I like communities, but I don’t get too involved. (My pet theory is that people who like to run online communities are actually all mysanthropists deep down.) I consider this a good thing. A little distance from the subject matter is essential. It helps keep me objective. And possibly sane.

I do receive a fuckload of annoying PR in the Whedonesque inbox, all about stuff that means nothing to me, not being American, not living in America. And probably wouldn’t mean anything to me if I were American, living in America. But I digress.

Perks. I has one. A kind soul gave me access to the Dollhouse screener, which contained an unfinished version of ‘Ghost’, the first episode. In case you’ve been living in cave, Dollhouse is Joss Whedon’s new television series for Fox, starring Eliza Dushku and Battlestar Galactica’s Tahmoh Penikett. You can read a synopsis of the show on Wikipedia. It is set to premier on February 13.

I remember catching my first glimpse of Buffy on TV (it was the sixth episode of the series’ first season: ‘The Pack’) and feeling compelled to keep watching it, unable to flip to another channel. Like being drawn in by Bob Ross’s hypnotic voice.

Dollhouse didn’t do that, in fact, the first time I watched it I zoned out several minutes into the first act. I like Eliza Dushku a lot, after all she was my favourite slayer. In this first episode, I think she did ok as ‘Caroline’* and as the innocent doll ‘Echo’. She’s also fairly good as the brazen character she’s ‘imprinted’ with in the first few minutes, but I found her far less believable as the character she becomes next, when she’s hired to mediate between a kidnapper and the abductee’s father. In fact, she looked so awkward and miniscule in her skirt suit and specs, it took me right out of the story. And that’s when the supporting characters began to stand out – especially on second viewing.

Tahmoh Penikett, playing the FBI-agent Paul Ballard, is as strong as he is as Helo in Battlestar Galactica. Harry Lennix, who plays Echo’s ‘handler’, doesn’t get a lot to do in this first episode, but he could be interesting. Amy Acker – who I never liked as Fred in ‘Angel’ – does a lot with her bit part as the Dollhouse doctor and I immediately wanted to know more about her scar-faced character. The actress who stood out the most, though, is Dichen Lachman. She plays ‘Sierra’, another doll. We catch a few brief glimpses of her throughout the episode, before she makes a striking entrance right at the end of the show. Kick ass, not unlike like Jessica Alba in ‘Dark Angel’, but with more exotic features. I couldn’t help but wish she’d been cast as Echo.

Whedon’s shows are always about the ensemble, and it isn’t the first time the supporting actors do more for me than the lead. I never liked the character Buffy that much and it took a while for me to take to any of the cast of Firefly, which completely failed to grab me in the first few episodes. So while not exactly confident, I am hopeful the series will prove to be a grower and that Dushku will prove to be as big a talent as Whedon says she is.

* Huh? Yeah, she’s called Caroline in a flash back, where she is reminiscent of the more vulnerable Faith we sometimes saw in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m just going to pretend Joss named her after me. Indulge me.

They’d listed us among the 25 essential fansites not too long ago.

Thank you, I can retire now.

I repeat, four U2log/Whedonesque readers ordered 30 dollar Cuisinarts.

Why?

Update: I had a closer look and it appears they are all parts for a Cuisinart, so it is probably just one user expanding. Ah well, it was funny while it lasted.

Is it a U2 special edition Cuisanart? Can you mash songs in it?

Which, y’know, is a thought that I have when checking on my fansites. Fansite, check. But… how do I cook dinner?
Rogue – 11 March 2005 – 20:05

Whedonesque.com was named ‘Blog of the week’ at The Times today and in the comments on the post announcing it, a number of our users ask why Whedonesque is a blog. Before I can answer, Joss Whedon himself pipes in and declares Whedonesque not a blog.

I try to explain that perhaps people’s interpretation of the world blog has changed somewhat over the last five years and that Whedonesque has all the characteristics of a weblog. Joss seems to call me pedantic, dismissing my reasoning and telling me language evolves, ergo, my blog no longer a blog. He seems to think I’m ‘nerd girl’ who needs to be taught a lesson in language.

Welcome to bizarro world.

He’d already left when I finally came up with the ‘let’s say in 10 years time, a tv series is something that has a jury and televoting, so sorry, your work is now called ‘fanfic” analogy. I am a crappy debater.

It seems most of our users have no idea the site is a weblog. I guess they’ve never gone near our About page.

I’m quite baffled.

4 comments

Caroline, you were the first person to link to my first weblog back in 1999, so I’ll always have your back. But even if I didn’t, I’d still think that you know what you’re talking about. You make great points all around.

I think maybe Joss is partially right, in that words do evolve and “blog” is being used in ways it wasn’t being used five years ago. But I wouldn’t call the word “evolving” so much as “being beaten around so much people don’t even know what it means anymore.” The linguistic examples he gave didn’t have to undergo the machinations of mass media. “Blog” seems to have a certain magic that marketers and product people latch on to and slap on their product to give it some extra oomph. There’s a radio station here in SF that has a woman reading entertainment gossip on their morning show, and they call that her “entertainment blog.” What the hell?

But then again, I’ve been around this scene almost as long as you, so I’m going to have a similar viewpoint and amount of emotional investment.

The one question I didn’t see anyone ask Joss was, “Okay, so if Whedonesque is not a blog, what is it?”
Jason (link) – 04 March 2006 – 23:13

‘I think maybe Joss is partially right, in that words do evolve and “blog” is being used in ways it wasn’t being used five years ago.’

I agree with that, but that doesn’t mean that what it meant before is no longer valid. How about this one: ‘Your child is no longer a child, but an adult. You should stop calling it your child.’ It makes no sense at all.
Caroline (link) – 04 March 2006 – 23:27

Indeed, agreed.
Jason (link) – 05 March 2006 – 03:06

This is crying out for a good pun but I can’t think of one.

When is a blog, not a blog? When it’s ajar… nope… rubbish.

Anyway, there are two thoughts on this – 1. aside from the award do you care whether it’s seen as a blog, or not? 2. As Jason asks “If it’s not a blog, what is it?! A content-rich, frequently updated website?

Spade and all that.
Gordon (link) – 06 March 2006 – 18:34

I’ve come a long way since then. Everybody I knew online back then has gone on to bigger, better, greater things. But none of them can boast this, I’m sure:

Whedonesque appeared in The Sun today.

And here’s the thread that goes with it.

“U2log.com – one of the first and best single-subject magazine-style weblogs. I’m not a great fan of U2, but it’s still an impressive site – and more importantly was created way before Gawker media and the current fad for commercial webloggery. I wonder if it makes any money…”

Finally, someone recognises U2log.com. I always feel it’s been ignored by web pundits — probably because they find its subject matter distasteful. I think I entered the site into the Webbies twice without being short listed while the much younger and more derivative Whedonesque got in without problems.

Do we make any money? No, we don’t. We don’t make any ‘big’ money. We make pocket money. Enough for me to buy my many editors a Christmas gift. Enough to pay for bandwidth over-usuage. We’re probably in the Top 5 U2 fansites, but nowhere near the largest. We get 5000 to 7000 (front)page hits per day and just had our busiest day last week at 23000 page hits.

We started this site as a joke, just some old IRC friends mucking about. Our style reflected this. We were irreverent, with a Brit/Aussie type humour – unlike any other U2 sites. Always taking the mickey out of the band. These days we’re rather professional, with press accreditation and access to big events, old skool reporting and what have you, but we’re still doing it because we’re obsessive about documenting the band and still in love with the music.

So many new web apps, so little time.

Kinja is a new weblog syndication web app weblog portal thought up by Meg Hourihan (Megnut, of Blogger fame) and Nick Denton (Gawker, Gizmodo, Moreover). Apparently Meg’s leaving the company at the end of this month, but her site’s down at the moment.

It was a bit creepy to find someone had already made icons for Whedonesque and prolific.org. Who are you? Where are you? Why are you reading me through a portal? Eeep. But anyway…

Kinja‘s lovely interface gets all confused by people’s different rss feeds. Sometimes the title becomes the header, sometimes it’s the date. (click image to enlarge)

And it does absolutely crazy stuff with my own feed, because it picked both the quicklink feed and the main blog. (See Kinja in action live, scroll down to prolific.org posts)

Update: Matt at Kinja tells me Kinja looks at HTML first. If the HTML parse fails, it falls back on the rss feeds. There’s a little bug in the post title parsing, but a fix is in the works.

• NickDenton.org: Kinja is Live. Does a good job explaining what it is and who it’s for: “Kinja is an RSS reader for people who don’t know what RSS is, who don’t know what a reader is, for that matter, or don’t care. ”