Atomic Razor

Genre TV Round Up: Summer Season

With the autumn, ahem, I suppose I must say Fall now, almost upon us, I wanted to do one of my periodic TV updates.  I've downloaded a bunch of the new "leaked" pilots too.

In no particular order:

Burn Notice: S2 is an improvement on S1.  Gabrielle Anwar still doesn't really do it for me.  She's too skinny but on the plus side she's effectively dropped the Oirish accent.  The rest of the show is spot on and the new arc involving Tricia Helfer, who really really does do it for me, and now Michael Shanks is shaping up nicely.  And, lest we forget, it has Bruce Campbell too.

The Middleman:  I have no idea how they got this funded and made but if you haven't been watching it, run out and do it now.  Even M, who is notoriously intollerant of Genre TV is completely hooked as The Middleman and sidekick Wendy Watson (Dub Dub) battle a range of super villans including a Mafia loving hyper intelligent gorilla, a troup of Masked Mexican wrestlers and assorted underworld creatures.  Just fantastic.  I can't imagine them getting a second seasion so catch it while you can.  Find the one with Kevin Sorbo as a Middleman from the 60s where Dub-Dub (Natalie Morales) dons the obligatory leather catsuit...  Naturally it is all done in the best possible taste.

Psych: Not exactly genre but still fun.  Definately something to do on a wet summer evening in Seattle.

Stargate Atlantis S5: Lacking something now Amanda Tapping has left (again).  This one is always something of a mixed bag and this season is no different.  Still not sure where the spine of this series is.

Eureka: Back for a 3rd season and lacking Matt Frewer, so we're sparred his Irish Accent.  Matt, you've worked in the UK, your wife is British - you could have done better!!!!  Weird story lines abound and an interesting arc developing.  Don't peak too closely at the wonky science and you'll be fine.

Fear Itself:  I've only watched the first episode of this horror series of self contained stories.  It was ok, but frankly there was nothing here to make me come back.

Pre-Air Pilot Leaks:
Fringe: The NEW X-Files from Alias/Cloverfield/Startrek bloke JJ Abrams.  The pilot was good.  Interesting, engaging, some oddball characters and it left no question that there was weird shit out there for the looking at.  This is going into the PVR without a doubt.  John Noble steals the show as the mad professor pulled out of a mental hospital to help solve the weird shit of the week.

Tru-Blood: This has been knocking around for a while. Set in the South of an America where Vampires have come out of the Coffin (as they say).  The pilot was interesting and a full series, if it gets out will be worth a look.

Returning shows to catch: The new Knight Rider, the excellent Sara Conner Chronicles.

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Biting my lip real hard...

New iPhone's connectivity bug a production glitch? - San Jose Mercury News

I will not comment.  I will not comment...

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Starter for Ten

It had to happen. And I hardly ever watch the programme because I can no longer bring myself to do so, so it is a genuine coincidence (it'll have to go in BG). I turn on University Challenge and St Anne's are one of the teams. There's even a physicist on the team - the perhaps appropriately named Cooling (he has that slightly plastic-y look that some people of indeterminate age have - probably too much make-up). We are trailing Selwyn College, Cambridge at the moment and falling further and further behind and I don't think there is time for us to recover.

We've lost. God damn it. In fact, we were thrashed, 180-110 ("A pretty convincing display of competence" according to Jeremy). To be fair, we'd have lost in 1986 also if they had hadn't the bizarre baton round they had in the last season of the original. I'm a bit disappointed that Cooling didn't the Meander diagram question, but perhaps astronomy is not his area. I think though that he really ought to have got the answer to the question "What physical quantity is defined as energy per unit volume or force per unit area). But then I do know exactly how much pressure he was under.

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Pakistan's Musharraf steps down

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Pakistan's Musharraf steps down

To quote Indy: I have a bad feeling about this...

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The Coming Fannish Singularity...

Following on from a point I made here, I've ended up getting involved in some unpleasantness over at _another_ place where what I hoped was a comment designed to spur some discussion has ended up with me losing my temper and a lot of people calling me names.  C'est La Vie.  We're a friendly bunch us fans.

The thing is it got me thinking about my earlier post, and also the nature of the concept of the Technological Singularity.

One of the core features of Singularity reasoning is that people who have gone through that Singularity event don't or can't communicate with people on the other side of the asymptote. What shocked me about the discussion I've just had is the realisation I've just seen part of it up close and it's actually to do with email, which is actually a symptom of a Singularity type activity that's been going on for some time.

My comment which sparked this was intended to be tongue in cheek: Email is Dead.

On the one level this is errant nonsense, email isn't dead.  We're using it every day.  Vast tonnes of it get spread around the web, most of it being Spam.  However, thinking critically about the nature of email, it occured to me that I can't actually remember the last time I sent a letter of any description that wasn't a bill, I can't recall writing a letter to anybody of any kind for decades.  I then realised that while I used to exchange dozens of emails with different friends and fans through the course of the day, my general interaction of that kind has dwindled to nothing.  Sure I'll send emails for specific purposes: arranging a panel at a con; asking a direction, personal question etc...

But apart from that my email use patterns for what can be called Fannish intent have altered over the last 5 years.  Most of it onto online forums, my Blog, LJ etc.  I'm down to one email list which comes via a Yahoo Group. 

So, while people can talk about the emails they've sent and the email they use for work, the way it is being used it already changing - the thing about change is not noticing it happening when you're doing it.

Which brings me back to some of the snarking that was made and how it applies to the concept of a singularity.  A few commentators said words to the effect of; well you can go off and lose your ability to write and we'll stay here thanks very much and we won't really miss your input. [I'm paraphrasing badly here, and lumping several protagonists together, sorry but it's for dramatic effect]

That is true in the short term.  But what happens over the medium term?

Yahoo Groups will continue for a while as a means to handle email lists but I'll be honest and say that over 5 years the number of such groups I have actively open has gone from 20 something to about 3 or 4 and only 2 of those have activity on them.  Yahoo itself is having problems and will certainly change or sell out in the next 12 months and besides, they have form for changing systems dramatically and without consultion.  So while there could be a scenario whereby people drift away, there is a more likely one that everything will be moved onto another format and the email portion is left to drift because it's too linked to spam and everybody is reading an RSS feed of some type.

The good thing about paper as a form for communication and the fanzine is that it is fairly resistant to upgrade problems.  OTOH email most certainly isn't, and I fear that even within our own culture we could be among the first to experience the dislocation of having swathes of the culture effectively digitally cut out of the mainstream of discourse and discussion.

In the snarky thread, in which I was misbehaving too, I did point out some really cool stuff that this is leading to.  Here's a couple:

 - Instant messaging during conversations.  At work, especially on large conference calls, we'll have a separate set of IM windows open for group and individual discussions where we'll shape what is being said and factor thoughts and suggestions into presentations IN REAL TIME.  If that isn't like telepathy I don't know what is.
 
 - Life Logging.  Between Twitter and truly awesome data storage and geo tagging - the sheer amount of ourlives which is being stored is shocking.  I've caught up with some old school friends via Facebook and it's almost like finding out that before about 2002/3 none of us actually existed.  No digital photos, very little online record that we ever existed.  The implications for the generation that started school in this decade are just astonishing.

John Scalzi's Hugo win started me thinking a lot about this, because that win in particular seemed to be seen in some quarters as a bad thing.  In some respects and some lights it could be:  it is signaling that the change and the way Fan Culture interacts and relates is probably changing quite fast.  The question is will we be able to recognise what comes out the other side of that?

If we can't, then we have our answer about Vernor Vinges thought experiment.

Now, all of this won't particularly affect me, in all honesty, but what I do worry about is what happens next when I might be the one railing against the young turk suggesting that we move over to the next thing...

Because, that day will probably happen and that thought actually is quite scary...

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Four Times It's...

In Putney, near the station, at the crossroads of Upper Richmond Road  (the South Circular), Putney High Street and Putney Hill, there are eighteen estate agents, eight next to one another along Upper Richmond Road, five opposite around the corner of the Upper Richmond Road and Putney Hill, one on Putney High Street more or less next to the station and four on the opposite side of the road. I think there might have been five as there appears to be a closed estate agents, but it is for the same firm as one a few doors along, which itself as a a To Let sign on it, although there appear to be properties being advertised. in the window.

I have heard of cluster effects in the provision of specialist goods and services, but this surely is ridiculous. Where it not for the fact that we are already in the most severe housing market crash for at least thirty years, I would be predicting either (a) the most severe housing market crash for at least thirty years; (b) the Estate Agent Event Horizon.

As Auric Goldfinger says in Goldfinger

Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."

We can apply that kind of reasoning to trends. A few months ago, I spotted two traditional-type sweet shops in the Covent Garden area. Admittedly, one of them was a branch of the traditional-type sweet shop in East Dulwich (what a place!), but two traditional-type sweet shops do not a trend make. Then a couple of Saturdays ago I spotted the third one in St Christopher's Place by going up Gee's Court straight off Oxford Street (which I didn't even know was there - Gee's Court that is). So, traditional-type sweet shops are now an Official Trend. And on Sunday, I saw a fourth one in the covered market in Greenwich. I don't what term Goldfinger would have used to describe the fourth one, but confirms the authenticity of the trend. And I have noticed a couple of pubs selling sweets to go with the more traditional crisps and nuts. Something is going on and with the housing market in meltdown perhaps it is the Sweet Event Horizon we should be anticipating.

Twists in the Tale

I was recently reading an interview with Scarlett Thomas in which she discussed Bright Young Things, her first "proper" novel (as opposed to the three now deprecated detective novels). The novel involves a group of twenty-something media trendies who mysteriously find themselves isolated on an island, possibly as part of some kind of reality show. I know from reading the reviews  on Amazon that there is some kind of twist (or twists) at the end. I have my own theory of what this twist (or family of twists) could be, but I don't want to read the book to find out (my views on Thomas's PopCo are well-known). If anyone could let me know what the revelation is, I would be eternally grateful (I know it's cheating, but I am not a patient man).

‘Being accused of being zeitgeisty can really wind me up,’ she admits with a wince. ‘I had all those ideas about Bright Young Things before Castaway and Big Brother were even announced. Because publishing takes so long to do anything, I was writing it in September 1999 and it came out in February 2001. Big Brother happened in 2001.’ She does acknowledge a habit of anticipating trends, caused by a hyper-awareness developed in childhood. ‘I am so geared up about observing. I see all the little details of everything.’

The first (Nasty Nick) UK series of Big Brother was 2000, but in another interview in 3:AM  Magazine, Thomas says that she finished writing BYT in November 1999. Castaway began on 1 January 2000, so the original adverts and pre-publicity would have been circulating quite some time earlier. The Dutch version of BB began in September 1999 (the idea allegedly arising during an John de Mol Produkties (part of Endemol) brainstorming session on 4 September 1997). Perhaps more pertinently,  the Swedish show Expedition: Robinson (from which Survivor, a massive hit in the US in 2000 was directly derived) began in 1997, but was "created" (did he come up with it himself or was it a researcher or production assistant?) by Charlie Parsons, the UK media mogul in the early 1990s. Of course, there was also MTV's The Real World and the BBC's The Living Soap (both (probably) derived from the 1991 Dutch Nummer 28). So one didn't haven't to be very zeitgeisty to feel that reality TV was in the air in the late 1990s (especially if one moved in media circles in London). And this leaves aside the endless prior elements in popular culture.

Thinking the Unthinkable

BBC NEWS | Politics | Northern cities 'beyond revival' Notice that this suggestion comes from Policy Exchange (Daily Telegraph: "the largest, but also the most influential think tank on the right"). And as all keen readers of Boris Watch know, many of Johnson closest advisers and most of his ideas (or rather the ideas of his administration) come from Policy Exchange (The Guardian: "hard-right" and "neo-conservative"). And as we all also know, the Johnson administration in London is a dry run for the forthcoming  Cameron administration (New Statesman: Policy Exchange is David Cameron's "favourite think tank") in the country as whole. So we cannot simply dismiss this is a fauxposal. Indeed we might we argue that we shouldn't. As the Razor has long pointed out, most of Britain's wealth (gained by skimming a cut off transactions that go through the City of London) is generated in the Brighton-Cambridge-Oxford-London triangle. That's where the wealth is and that's where the people ought to go. Which means that's where the new house should be build. The consequence of this is that in fifteen years' time (I expect the Tories to be in power for half a generation), Abingdon will be a suburb of Oxford as opposed to a satellite town and the houses in the lovely South Oxfordshire countryside between Wallingford and Junction 6 of the M40 may or may not be worth as much as they are today (my guess is that they would be worth more as I suspect that development will not intrude significantly in these kinds of greenbelt or quasi-greenbelt areas, but that the proximity to both London and the new Manchester-size Greater Oxford would raise the value of houses in proximate rural areas). The author makes the point that regional centres such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle can thrive even in a globalised world, but that they don't have the strength to pull up secondary regional centres (Liverpool, Bradford, Sunderland) with them. As for tertiary regional centres like Preston, all I can say is that there is also a great deal of attractive countryside in Lancashire.

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The Intrinsic Fan

(Reposted from my LJ because we don't have enough SF feuding here)

Blogging is not intrinsically "fannish;" blogs are not a fannish
invention. In some respects they are in fact anti-fannish. The fact
that Scalzi blogs does not make him any less a pro seeking to boost his
pro career or any more fannish.

--Ted White

There are multiple problems I have with this comment that Ted made to me on an email list I'm on (and I'll respond to him in due course when I have thought more about this), not least of which is, I don't actually know what an intrinsic Fan actually is.  I don't mind Fanzines myself, but they're not a part of Fandom I particularly Grok, likewise I've been known to read Fantasy and my tolerance for bad Media SF is legend.

I've sung at the piano with Ian Sorenson at a Media related con and Stomped... er... let's leave it at Stomped on _things_ at one of James Bacon's conventions.  I've also discussed the nature of Alien Life forms with a variety of authors over curry and whiskey, Peter Hamilton once broke my front door and I've held several Oscars. 

I'm reasonably well read and I am an occasional Blogger, which is why I know that actually finding the volume of stuff that's interesting to post is quite hard.  Scalzi actually does it well and while a lot of his stuff isn't Fan related it's hardly all self promotion either.  OTOH his recent Video Blog of books in his inbox was excellent, his trip to the Creation Museum highly amusing and there's a lot on there that I enjoy.

But what Ted, I suppose, is asking, is: is that Fannish?

My answer is Yes.  At least for my values of Fandom.

Ted's might be different.

But that ability for us to be different and yet all identify as Fen is something which, I actually think, is intrinsically fannish.

Anyway, that's enough of me wittering on about this...

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...And Call It a Weasel

I saw another weasel run across the road on the B4009 just outside Watlington on the stretch of road towards Britwell Salome again this morning. Of course, it might have been the same weasel.

There's also a dead and rather stiff looking badger by the side of the road rather further along the road beyond Britwell Salome towards Benson.