Archives

Caprica reminds me of Ghost in the Shell; is Awesome, too

Starting from when I was little, modifying a simple tape player to record voice at different speeds and using it to make stupid skits with my friends, to learning how to type on my first computer - a Macintosh SE, to busting out my first webpage as a teen, the way we use technological advances to entertain and make our everyday lives better has always been a fascinating subject to me.

So when I came across Ghost in the Shell years ago and the subsequent series’ that followed and found it took the subjects of life and technology and smacked them together to explore life as technology, I was hooked.

Main character Motoko Kusanagi’s beautiful looks combined with her bad-ass nature are enough to draw in any anime fan based on fan service potential alone, but the fact her brain and a segment of her spinal cord were all that remained from her original existence - leaving her encased in a cybernetic body – revealed the genius of creator Shirow Masamune’s existentialist character study. Unlike HAL in '2001: A Space Odyssey' – a computer programmed to behave and react like a human being, the idea was twisted around in GitS; by putting a human brain inside a robotic body, it effectively amplified the audience’s awareness of Motoko’s struggles to cope with her identity while fighting crime in a future time.

Caprica, the offspring of acclaimed series Battlestar Galactica, is already showing interesting similarities to Ghost in the Shell even at only two episodes deep.

Warning: spoiler alert.

Without getting too deep into the plot for those unfamiliar with BSG history, a major storyline centers around Zoe, the teen-aged daughter of wealthy technologist Daniel Graystone, the man responsible for development of robots known as Cylons for purposes of armament and security – picture a cross between Robocop and The Terminator. He also created a Matrix-like virtual environment known as the Holoband, where Zoe finds a way to use as a means to upload a ‘copy’ of herself known as an Avatar.

Well, her dad finds out about this after a terrorist attack claims her life, downloads the avatar, and in a desperate attempt to bring his daughter back into the real world, uploads it into his 7-foot-tall, thousand-pound Cylon prototype. An error occurs, he thinks she’s gone, but we soon find out she’s now actually stuck inside this thing.

Much like Motoko’s character in GitS, Zoe is inside an artificial body, a fact not even her father has yet to realize. The second episode cuts between showing Zoe as a giant menacing robot and her true self, illustrating her imprisonment in a larger than life frame. It’s really well done as she attempts to walk a tightrope between staying hidden from those who might try to destroy her, and telling her best friend who may one of only a few voices of reason to help her.

It’s an awesome idea for how to approach a character, and when you package it inside a well-acted, visually stunning prequel to Battlestar, you’ve got the makings of one kickass show.

Although I’ve read the ratings so far haven’t been great early on, here’s hoping word gets out on how awesome Caprica is shaping up to be. If you like crime syndicate drama served with a side of sci fi, Caprica is a dish you’ll want to consume often… without any of the cheesiness of my food metaphors.

Caprica airs Fridays at 9 Eastern on SyFy in the US, and Thursdays at 8 in Canada on SPACE.

How Apple Blew the Announcement of the iPad

Unless you've been living under a rock, and let's face it, there's likely internet access and 3G coverage underneath rocks these days, you know Steve Jobs marched up in front of a salivating crowd in dramatic fashion - as we've come to expect from the fearless leader of the Apple cult.. er, company - and unveiled the iPad, the long awaited, and even longer rumoured tablet computer.

It was touted to be a replacement for netbook computers... It's not. That's not the problem, though.

What may surprise you is that the problem is also not the lack of a camera, expandable memory, USB slots, SD card slot, Flash support in Safari, multitasking, HDMI out, AVI support for movies, or a stylus.

No, those things are only a byproduct of the real problem. The real problem is outlined in the photo below:

It's the hype.

It's also massive secrecy prior to the unveiling. It's allowing us geeks to let our imaginations run wild because Apple wants the iPad to be all things to all people.

Apple's marketing team are made up of geniuses. The huge stage, the clear outlining of features, the emphasis on simplicity - it's what's sold people on the iPhone, even though you couldn't copy and paste text. That small drawback was forgivable, because the iPhone has so much going for it, and is useful to such a large segment of the population. In short, the iPhone broke new ground and set the bar for what smartphones could achieve.

The iPad? Not so much. Without retaining any humility in who Apple thinks could really benefit from the iPad, the people who got the most excited over this were us technophiles. We wanted the features we were seeing on netbooks, and pushed for the juggernaut that is Jobs and company to deliver. What Apple _should_ have said right from the get-go was that they had a new device for soccer moms.

The iPad is more or less a simple browsing device that can play some videos, let you do a bit of emailing, read a book, and if you dare, make a call.

That's about it. It's for your aunt who is tired of her Windows PC popping up spyware ads for spiky dildos when she's just trying to get her mail and read up on the news.

It's for the businessman who needs to show a slide presentation, open a few websites on the go and read over today's meeting notes.

In other words, the iPad is for the casual user, and for these purposes it works damn well. The problem is Apple couldn't come right out and admit that, and now look a tad foolish for raising such a big stink about this thing.

With expectations at such a fever pitch, and with Steve Jobs standing in front of a screen twelve times the size of God to unveil the next great innovation, you'd better bring all the goods or you're getting panned.

It didn't have to be that way. If we knew who this device was for before it was released, it'd have gotten a pass. Instead, we've got the very customer base who could use this device for some convenient, time saving applications, getting trickled down jokes from us geeks comparing it to a tampon.

So, little favour Steve: it's time to stop acting like you need every person on the planet to buy every product you put out - you're worth $50 billion now, it’s okay to dial down the hype a notch when you put out a niche product. Relax... and give us geeks the goods in iPad Gen2, and maybe we’ll spread the good word again.

What to expect when Jay Leno Resumes The Tonight Show...

In light of the recent controversy surrounding The Tonight Show, here's what you can expect more of once Jay Leno reclaims his old 11:35 timeslot, courtesy a clip from The Dana Carvey Show(1996):

Bob Kinnear Needs to Wake Up

A recent photo posted to Twitter showing a Toronto Transit Commission employee sleeping on the job has made its way to mainstream news, inciting Amalgamated Transit Union leader Bob Kinnear to respond publicly:

"There have been many media enquires about a picture taken at 10:00 p.m. on January 9 of a TTC Collector described as "sleeping" in the booth.

The TTC is conducting an enquiry on this and until this is completed the union will have no comment on the matter except this:

Whatever the outcome of the enquiry, it is very discouraging that the picture taker and, apparently, other customers, made no attempt to determine if there was anything wrong with this TTC employee. A simple knock on the glass might have determined if the Collector was, in fact, asleep, or whether he was unconscious as a result of some medical problem. The reports that passengers were laughing at him as they passed by the booth makes this even more disturbing.

The union will comment further at an appropriate time."

Is he kidding? Nope! Kinnear appears to actually be blaming the public for not checking on the Collector - ie. avoiding taking a photo of him and posting it online and causing embarrassment for the TTC. That obviously didn't happen, and the ATU leader's outcry is about as insane as it gets - especially considering there's been no news of any medical condition or emergency situation suffered by the slumbering ticket collector, shown in the most relaxed position I've ever seen someone in an office chair. Maybe he was having a heart attack and instead of collapsing or calling for help, decided to clasp his hands, push his chair back, and recline peacefully.

Kinnear's response is something I would expect to read on The Onion - completely unbelievable, presumed tongue-in-cheek and lacking any connection to reality. He wraps quotation marks around "sleeping" even a full two weeks after the fact, as if it's somehow still up in the air whether the employee was actually taking a nap.

Dear Mr. Kinnear: It's not such a big deal that one of your employees was caught grabbing a little shut-eye, but you're making this bigger than it needs to be by pointing the accusing finger your customers.

P.S. - He was asleep, dude.

Perhaps Kinnear unconsciously made the choice to take a stance that was so over-the-top, he wanted to push the envelope of absurdity to find out what he could say without any real repercussions.

Regardless of the actions - or lack thereof - that result after Kinnear's stated ignorance of the pink elephant in the booth, this seems to show the lengths to which he will protect his employees even while the evidence stares him in the face, albeit mouth-ajar . And if disciplinary action is handed down to the Collector after all, it would be a surprise to me after Kinnear's melodramatic defensive stance.

I think Bob Kinnear is the one who needs to wake up.

Typography: It's pretty damn important.

Typography is in everything we read. It's used in everything from billboards, TV commercials, websites, to your pet's bag of food. It's the art of designing type, understanding what looks good and what doesn't, and what looks best when marketing a product or even an idea. In short, typography is everything.

I came across Typophile.com, a community of people obsessed with type. It's got people designing the layouts of multilingual books, beer bottles, and more. It's a place where the term 'nitpicking' doesn't exist, because while it looks like a massive debate about minutiae, it's an intricate discussion about the designs that shape our world.

Since this is my blog and I talk about the things I find interesting, I'm pasting the introductory blog post I made on Typophile as a means of reminding myself to stick with the site. It's probably not very interesting to you that the way a certain letter curves at the end can make or break a design, but it's becoming more fascinating to me. Anyway, at the risk of overlapping what I said over on that site, down to business.

What's up folks. I came across this site recently and decided to jump aboard.

The idea of breaking down a typeface into its most minute aspects used to seem unnecessary. Coming from a web design background, I chose one of the 11 web-safe fonts and pushed ahead. When CSS came along and positioning became a lot more malleable a component of the design process, I began to see type in a different way. More recently, embedding just about any font into a website has become possible through various means including CSS and XML-injected Flash content. That's when I knew I should take this stuff more seriously.

So I'm here to browse conversations, and learn from what appear to be a community of some very learned individuals. I've already seen a few typography books mentioned as must-haves and will be picking them up sooner than later. So my hopes in being a part of this site is that it will become part of my daily routine, and I'll pick up some knowledge I otherwise can't afford to get in a classroom environment.

A couple of those books on my wish list are Otl Aicher's typographie and Joseph Blumenthal's Typographic Years. Knowing many of the greatest type designers did everything by hand, I feel pretty lucky my road to becoming a typographical Zen master is paved with computers.

So the next time you take a look at the name on the side of a building or peruse your grocery store's frozen food section, take a pause and think of how the decision to use that specific font... in that size... in that position, more than likely involved a hell of a lot of hours to come up with.

Jay Leno Sucks.

When Johnny Carson handed the reins of the Tonight Show over to Jay Leno in 1992, he did so with a great deal of reluctance. Johnny wanted to pass the torch to who many thought was the natural successor to the Tonight Show – David Letterman. A lot of backroom politics, hiding in closets, and corporate maneuvering kept that from happening. And the man responsible for those moves was Jay Leno.

The next time you’re sitting down with Netflix wondering what to stream, download The Late Shift for a better idea of what I’m talking about.

The kind of slimy moves Leno made to get himself The Tonight Show in ’92 are the same moves he’s making 18 years later to get right back to where he started.

Amazingly, some people actually thought Jay Leno was going to step down in favour of Conan keeping The Tonight Show to alleviate all the drama that’s taking place. Here’s why those people are wrong:

NBC wanted to push Jay Leno out of the Tonight Show, as idiotic as that was. Leno was getting good ratings as host at 11:30, mostly based on having strong lead-ins from prime time. NBC has made a lot of stupid moves, but that's beside the point. They wanted to mess with what worked and bring Conan up an hour. Conan jumped at the chance, and who wouldn't?

Much of what brings viewers into late night is having the 10-o’clock drama hour packed with strong shows like Law and Order, ER, and most recently cop drama Southland, a show with strong ratings after its debut. NBC dominated in that department for the longest time, which fed into Leno’s banal, non-edgy talk show. As pablum as it was, it was a formula that worked.

So instead of riding off into the sunset and passing the Tonight Show baton to Conan, Jay made it all about himself. When Jay’s 10:00 show was starting up, everyone was talking about it – because it got promoted far and above Conan’s move. Everywhere you looked, Leno was being advertised for his big move to 10.

Wait a minute, I thought this was supposed to be about Conan's triumphant ascension into the late night throne? It became about Jay.

For a guy who announced he was leaving the Tonight Show back in 2004 – a guy who had a full 5 years to plan his next move, he wanted to do the same show at 10? He wasn't leaving? He was going to have people driving a green car? His biggest change was getting rid of his desk? Really? He was just going to do the same show but even more neutered?

That was it?

The ratings didn’t lie – “The Jay Leno Show” was a disaster, and had local affiliates threatening NBC to preempt it to stop the bleeding.

Meanwhile, who suffered? Conan O'Brien.

By having one of the weakest lead-ins in the history of television, there was hardly a person left to watch Conan on the Tonight Show at 11:30. Leno knew it and wanted it that way. It was his plan all along - he never wanted to leave in the first place.

As you may have heard, NBC offered to put Leno back at 11:35 while pushing Conan to just after midnight with The Tonight Show, which Coco summarily rejected – as he should have. You can’t have The Tonight Show be pushed around the dial after 60 years of tradition, merely because a guy who failed at 10pm wants his old slot back. Hell, it wouldn’t even BE the tonight show, it would be the TOMORROW show.

It’s no coincidence that pretty much everyone in late night is calling Jay out on the carpet for this. Dave Letterman has ripped into Leno the past few days. It's no coincidence that Jimmy Kimmel went as far as to slap on a fake chin, a whiny voice affect and proceeded to dedicate the entire hour of his show to lampooning Jay Leno, even during interviews. It's not by chance that Leno, on the other hand plays the innocent and hardly gives it a mention, instead taking a couple of softball jabs at NBC instead of acknolwedging that he's the one benefitting from all this.

So what happened today? Leno’s getting his old timeslot back, from 11:35-12:35.

Can you see why I'm not at all surprised? Because Jay Leno sucks.

so I fix computers...

Part of what I do with my many years worth of geek know-how is fix computers. I can build them, take them apart, and pretty much troubleshoot whatever's wrong with them along all segments of the OSI Model. So I may as well make a few extra bucks at it, right?

Large troubleshooting companies such as Geek Squad annoy me because they employ people who truly have no clue what they're doing - they simply run a program called MRI that performs a memory and virus scan. Big deal.

Anyway, here's the print ad I conjured up. The image of the frustrated old man comes from a book of royalty-free images I found laying at the curb of someone's house in Chintatown. One man's trash...

Invaders! Possibly from Space... The Game!

What if life were more like a video game? Well, for any Futurama fans out there - and I know you're out there - some genius by the pseudonym of Shinobi has created a playable version of 'Invaders! Possibly from Space!' from Futurama S3E18: Anthology of Interest II, replete with show clips and Rush's Tom Sawyer! Here's a video:

Download it here. (RAR,17.2MB)

Once you've played it... you can't un-play it!

courtesy: GotFuturama

Happy 2010!

Although we're already a couple of days into the new decade, I just wanted to send a long a quick Happy 2010 (that's Twenty-Ten, not Two-Thousand-and-Ten) to all. Do your part to make this year kick some serious ass - I know I will.

To kick things off, here's a funny Star Trek parody from one of my favourite cartoons growing up, Animaniacs. Enjoy, and Happy New Year!