tv

Monday

It’s true, I didn’t do much today besides watch the first couple of Season 3 episodes of The Walking Dead, watch Thunderball, and watch the third and final Presidential debate.

I think that may be a textbook example of diminishing returns.

The Walking Dead had a surprisingly very good pair of episodes leading into the new season. I’ve never hidden my problems with the show, but I thought these episodes absolutely improved upon some of the problems of last season. It helps that the prison is a much more interesting location, but it was more interesting in the comics, and I threw up my hands after only six issues of that (18 total).

Thunderball was okay, though of the four James Bond movies I’ve watched in recent months probably my least favorite. There are far too many underwater fight scenes, and it honestly starts to drag.

And speaking of starting to drag…well, again, you can always check out my Twitter feed if you want to know what I thought of the debate.

I’m back to work tomorrow, though not from the office, which is nice.

Sunday

Except for short breaks to do the crossword puzzle — not terribly fun, as it happens — and watch the latest episode of Doctor Who — about which I actually do intend to say more later — I spent the whole day working on Kaleidotrope. Oh, okay, I also played a little of Infinity Blade II, with which I am slightly obsessed, and way too many rounds of computer solitaire. (And you know, I get that there are some hands of solitaire that simply can’t be won, but it’s annoying that the Windows version includes so many of them.) But lots of Kaleidotrope. The Autumn 2012 issue is very nearly done.

Completely done would make me happier, but it’s getting there.

Wednesday various

  • A lot has been written recently about the “film,” Innocence of Muslims, notably its offensiveness to Muslims (and film lovers), the violence that’s erupted in its wake, and the duplicitous nature with which it was made. Now, via Neil Gaiman one of the actresses speaks out:

    It’s painful to see how our faces were used to create something so atrocious without us knowing anything about it at all. It’s painful to see people being offended with the movie that used our faces to deliver lines (it’s obvious the movie was dubbed) that we were never informed of, it is painful to see people getting killed for this same movie, it is painful to hear people blame us when we did nothing but perform our art in the fictional adventure movie that was about a comet falling into a desert and tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it, it’s painful to be thought to be someone else when you are a completely different person.

  • I’m not quite sure I buy into the idea of Breaking Bad as a “White supremacist fable” entirely — it’s probably true the show doesn’t get the drug trade right, but, then, it’s not really about the drug trade, is it? — but there’s some interesting food for thought here:

    White-washing the illegal drug market involves depicting it like markets wealthy viewers are more comfortable and familiar with, namely those of the farmers market or the local pharmacy. Walter White combines the ostensible moral complexity television audiences demand in a post-Soprano protagonist with a cleanliness that allows him to market expensive cars. The U.S. is still very much a white supremacist country, but classic cowboys-kill-Indians narratives don’t play with wealthy viewers or the critics who help determine those tastes. And Jack Bauer can drive only so many cars. For the credulous viewer who likes to imagine he’s a couple of life crises from being the Larry Bird of meth — and for the people who sell him stuff — White is right.If nothing else, the article makes me want to re-watch The Wire.

  • John Green on self-publishing and Amazon:

    Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (You’ll note that there’s no self-published literary fiction anywhere near the kindle bestseller lists.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.

  • This isn’t new, but: Jonathan Coulton on the future of music, 3D printing, and scarcity:

    This is my bias: the decline of scarcity seems inevitable to me. I have no doubt that this fight over mp3s is just the first of many fights we’re going to have about this stuff. Our laws and ethics already fail to match up with our behaviors, and for my money, those are the things we should be trying to fix. The change is already happening to us, and it’s a change that WE ARE CHOOSING. It’s too late to stop it, because we actually kind of like a lot of the things that we’re getting out of it.

  • And finally, PBS asks, “Can fandom change society?” [via]

Monday various

Sunday

A pretty average day. The New York Times crossword and the writing group. I wrote this:

The man in black couldn’t sing a note, which is how Julie says you know he couldn’t be the devil. Lucifer, she tells Jack, was the angel of all music. He was also the father of all lies, Jack wants to say, but doesn’t. He has his own reasons for not believing what the townspeople have said about the man, the rumors that have started to spread, and he doesn’t need to argue the point with his sister. The devil can go get his own damn advocate.

Jack’s locked the man up, of course. As sheriff, and after what happened last night at Grady’s, how could he not? But running the man’s prints and sending his photo up to county is one thing; putting stock in what some of the survivors have claimed is another. He opened fire, that much is clear. Jack took the guns off the man himself, emptied the antique things into evidence, and saw first-hand the bloody handiwork they’d done. Eight dead, at last count, and Bill Grady himself still touch and go, a bullet busting ribcage, piercing lung, and then lodging itself in the empty wall above the bar.

That’s where Jack found it this morning, digging it out of the plaster and wood with a penknife. Not that there’ll be much call for matching ballistics, or that they’ll even be able to do it here, on site. The bullet and guns will be shipped, along with the man himself if Jack has anything to say about it, downstate. And the bullets will be a match, there’s little doubt of that in Jack’s mind. Homemade, from the look of the slug sitting bagged on his desk, and the guns themselves at least a century old. Amazing they didn’t just explode in the man’s face.

No, they’ll send the man down to county to be arraigned. If Judge Keach tries to give Jack any grief over that, he’ll just tell her some of the stories he’s been starting to hear, the crazy talk that’s sprung up in the wake of last night’s bloodbath. Blood on his hands or not, the man deserves a fair trial, and that’s not going to happen in a town that’s half-convinced he’s the devil himself.

“Have you even listened to him sing?” Julie asks. Like Jack needs this now, like he needs even more crazy, this time from his sister. “Can’t sing a note, worst I’ve ever heard. And that’s not the voice of the Morningstar.”

He really doesn’t need this. Of course Jack’s heard the man sing. It’s loud and off-key and hasn’t stopped for more than hour since last night. Nothing Jack can recognize, but that’s for the county psychiatrists to puzzle out.

The whole thing pretty clearly was influenced by this week’s Western-themed Doctor Who. (“Anachronistic electricity, keep-out signs, aggressive stares — has someone been peeking at my Christmas list?”)