Category: Television

  • Schrödinger’s Capo

    Well, that didn’t last. One week and seven episodes after I started watching The Sopranos, I found out how it ended. The culprit was Ron Moore’s “Battlestar Galactica” blog, of all things. Technically, it got ruined much earlier, several times over; I just hadn’t realized that when Yahoo News changed their big headline from “Will…

  • Got myself a gun… about seven years late.

    Update: Hey, this post was rambling and non-sensical even for me. I’ll leave it as an example of what happens when you put stuff on the internets while tired. But here’s what I would’ve written had I been typing coherently last night: “The Sopranos” aired its series finale this week. In the seven years the…

  • At least my name isn’t Earl, I suppose.

    Now I know how the Geico Caveman feels. One of my friends has been complaining that a Korean R&B singer has stolen her identity. I don’t know if one Korean singer is better or worse than an entire new series (warning: that link plays video). The series, which I decree shall never again be mentioned…

  • I just want a decent copy of this video!

    My favorite commercial ever, back from when Cartoon Network was still cool, has been impossible to find for years. Once again, YouTube saves the day: I would’ve been willing to move back to Atlanta and work for Cartoon Network all based on that one ad. And the one where Jinx the Cat is riding a…

  • Uncanny Valley

    In robotics (and increasingly used in talking about CGI), the term “Uncanny Valley” refers to the point at which the attempt to make an artificial character more human-like backfires, and the character becomes more repulsive and disturbing than realistic. Scott McCloud gives a simple, easily understandable explanation for why this happens in Understanding Comics: humans…

  • Too Hot for Television

    Last night Fox aired the two-part pilot for its series “Drive”, with another episode tonight. It’s about an illegal cross-country Cannonball Run-style car race for 32 million dollars, where the racers are coerced into participating, spies hired by the race operators are everywhere, and death is one of the punishments for finishing last (presumably). It’s…

  • Hellboy + Obakemono = Nerd Bliss

    Normally, seeing my favorite things come together three separate times in one week would be downright eerie, but I don’t think Hellboy: Sword of Storms counts. For one thing, it’s old news. It was aired on Cartoon Network back in October, and due to a TiVo mishap, I’m just now catching it on DVD. For…

  • So Like Us

    Speaking of set detail and “Battlestar Galactica,” I think I may have uncovered more shocking evidence that the colonists have connections to Earth. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again: Like all of the Battlestars, the Galactica relies on NEC’s Multisync Series for the brightest, sharpest LCD displays in the entire…

  • Many anal-retentive Bothans died to bring us this information.

    I was just watching a few minutes of the original “Battlestar Galactica” series, and because I’m a nerd, I noticed that the displays and panels in the Vipers were full of English text. Because I’m a really big nerd, I started to wonder what that means in the context of the series as a whole.…

  • Idiot Box

    Back when I was writing columns for SFist, one of the things I kept harping on was that Apple should make a DVR. If they could do for television what they did for the iPod, that’d be huge, right? An interface for TV as slick as OS X, without as many of the weird limitations…

  • Two more of my favorite things

    The planets must be aligning or something. I saw that two more of my favorite things are coming together: the RiffTrax guys released a track for the pilot episode of “Lost”. I haven’t listened to it yet, but of course I bought it the second I saw it and realized what it was. This RiffTrax…

  • Too much confusion

    The season 3 finale of “Battlestar Galactica” aired tonight. According to the SciFi channel, season 4 doesn’t start until 2008. Word on the street is that there’ll be a two-hour movie “bridging” the season, not continuing from the finale, but introducing things that’ll be resolved in season 4. In my whole history of watching things,…