Poking My Head In

I know, it's been ridiculously silent around here lately, and I never got around to posting those pictures from Brazil (I might yet, if it doesn't seem absurdly late to do so). In my defense, I have been writing--it's just that most of it is for other venues and is leaving me with very little free time to consume books or films or TV, much less write about them. That'll change, hopefully, in the near future.

In the meantime, a few thoughts and links:

  • I'm glad the Danish kidney donor show turned out to be a hoax, but I haven't exactly regained my faith in humanity in the wake of this revelation. Most of the reactions I read over the last week assumed the show was in earnest. Maybe I just hang around a particularly gullible corner of the internet, or maybe we've reached the point where we no longer believe there are any depths to which people won't sink in the pursuit of fame and fortune. More importantly, the people who tuned into that show probably did believe that they were going to see a dying woman force sick people to dance around for a chance at survival. These are the same people, the show's creators are now hoping, who possess enough compassion and decency to register, not only as organ donors, but as potential live organ donors. Am I the only one seeing a flaw in this chain of reasoning?


  • Dan Hartland on Veronica Mars and the fannish experience.


  • The SciFi Channel confirms that Battlestar Galactica's fourth season will be its last. "This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end," quoth David Eick and Ronald D. Moore. Good luck trying to cram all three into a single season.

    But seriously, folks. I'm intrigued by both the show-runners' and the SciFi Channel's willingness to kill off what must be a very lucrative cash cow. It seems to run so contrary to the attitudes I've come to expect from TV executives--the SciFi Channel's being no exception. (Link via Iain)


  • Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship, it's about television. Even leaving aside the whole 'the author is dead' debate, it seems awfully late in the game to be coming out with these kinds of declarations.


  • I am genuinely excited at the thought of watching last night's Doctor Who. This is the first time this season I've been able to make this claim (and next week: Steven Moffat!).

Comments

Mike Taylor said…
Oh boy, Family of Blood. My wife and I watched it last night. When it was finished we say it total silence for sixty seconds before either of us felt ready to re-enter the real world. I know it's bad form to say "best episode ever" whenever a good one crops up, and I've already said it about Father's Day and The Empty Child/Doctor Dances, but I think this is it.
June 03, 2007 12:14 PM
Anonymous said…
Is the Dan Hartland link working?
June 03, 2007 7:19 PM
Abigail Nussbaum said…
I hadn't noticed that Dan's essay was friends-locked. He was kind enough to unlock it, however, so you should be able to read it now.
June 03, 2007 11:07 PM

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse

The last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelation of serious irregularities in the compilation of the award's ballot, there was a great ferment of conversation and action. Mainstream publications have caught wind of the scandal and publicized it far and wide . Turnover in the few permanent committees that oversee the Hugo trademark and intellectual property has been high . The poor folks at the upcoming Glasgow Worldcon have been scrambling to respond to the evolving situation and to distance themselves from the previous committee—including, most recently, making a laconic announcement that they would refuse any of Chengdu's passalong funds, the budgetary surplus that is traditionally bequeathed from one Worldcon to the next. And stats nerds—of which this community is, unsurprisingly, blessed with a surfeit—have been furiously crunching the nominations numbers and EPH calculations...
Read more

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an Asterisk

It's been a while since we've had one of these dramas. On Saturday, the nominating stats for the 2023 Hugo awards, which were announced in Chengdu, China in October 2023, were released to the public . There was a great deal of anticipation for these numbers, in no small part because of their much-delayed release. Though the WSFS constitution permits Hugo administrators to wait as long as 90 days before releasing the voting and nominating stats, most Hugo teams have them ready to go within minutes of the ceremony's conclusion. Chengdu, in contrast, waited the full allotted period, and even went a little bit over (the voting stats were released separately in December). Once the stats were released, it quickly became clear why the Chengdu Hugo team were hesitant to make them public. There are any number of irregularities and questionable choices in this document that suggest everything from erratic voter behavior, to incompetent collation and calculation of the nomination rank...
Read more

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The first thing that must be said about this movie is that it should not work. It's a prequel to one of the most mind-blowing, groundbreaking, and just plain revolutionary action movies of the 21st century—and prequels are a bad idea in most cases, but all the more so when the character they revolve around has already given you their entire backstory in their original introduction, which is also the final, culminating act of their character arc. (To put it another way, if you had asked me, nine years ago, which character I thought offered more fertile ground for prequel storytelling, Imperator Furiosa or Han Solo, I would have picked Han without a moment's hesitation, and I don't even like Han that much.) And it's a follow-up to a movie whose chief virtue lies in its conciseness—in being a single, drawn-out, pulse-pounding, increasingly deranged car chase. Which means you can either try to repeat that accomplishment, which will inevitably feel a bit old hat; or you can ...
Read more