There are conflicting press releases and unconfirmed TV listings floating about at the moment, but it seems to be certain that BBC TWO will be showing Family Guy from Saturday the 22nd of October. Unfortunately right now it looks like it’s going to be season three rather than season four, despite the announcement that the BBC has bought the rights to season four.
Bloglines Feedback
The Bloglines news blog has a post talking about the new features they added recently. But my favourite bit of the post is this:
Please let us know what you think about our new features. No need to send email, just post to your blog and our Bloglines saved searches will pick up your feedback.
For some reason I just love the attitude of "don’t bother to contact us; just talk about us and we’ll know." You guys rock.
Bloglines Update
I left a comment somewhere recently in which I said I wasn’t really happy with the interfaces of either Bloglines or Google Reader. Two of the shortcomings of Bloglines that I was referring to have since been fixed. They have added keyboard shortcuts for next/previous post, refresh, next subscription, next folder and show all new posts. These make it a lot easier to browse posts quickly. The other fix is that posts that you tell it to "keep new" are indicated seperately to actual new posts in the subscriptions list, so that you get a listing like "Some Random Blog (2:1)" instead of "Some Random Blog (3)" that you used to see. This means I’ll be staying with Bloglines for a little while longer.
Serenity
Despite being aparently unwelcome at IMC, I did get to see Serenity this weekend. I hadn’t been this excited to see a movie since The Fellowship of the Ring, and I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a movie this much since then either. Given the opportunity I would’ve stayed in my seat and watched it again.
Buffy fans will already know how great Joss Whedon is (as will Firefly fans, obviously) but what can everyone else expect from the movie? For a start, characters that you care about almost from the outset; explosions; a universe with more depth than most othere SF movies (Whedon plans stories years in advance so he had enough detail for at least two seasons of Firefly); humour, but not comedy; more explosions; fancy martial arts; and a hot chick with super powers.
Apparently Jonathon Ross said Serenity was better than all three Star Wars prequels combined. Frankly I think it’s comfortably better than all six Star Wars. It’s certainly far more likely to find its way into my DVD collection.
I plan to do a Top 5 films of 2005 list at the end of the year. If King Kong manages to steal the number one spot from Serenity I will be very impressed (not to mention pleased). Not everyone will like it as much as I did, but I can’t see anyone not enjoying this movie.
If you want a taste, ifilm has the first nine minutes of the movie available as a free streaming video.
Letter to IMC Cinemas
A comment I just sent via IMC Cinemas’ contact form:
This comment should ideally be directed to the person or persons in charge of administrating the IMC cinemas website. However, as with the rest of the site, the comment form seems to have been deliberately designed to impede me. I’m therefore directing the comment to Dun Laoghaire IMC because that’s the cinema that is losing out on my bookings.
I’m curious about your descision to exclude Web users who don’t use the Internet Explorer browser on Windows, as well as those who have not installed or cannot install Macromedia Flash. Is IMC so successful that it can afford to ignore at least 10% of potential online bookings? Are Mac and Linux users not welcome at your cinema? What about people who choose to use alternative browsers? Mozilla Firefox has a worldwide browser market share of nearly 10%, and a higher share than that in Ireland.
Most importantly, has IMC no interest in providing their service to people with visual or motor-control disabilities, who might have to use special assitive browser technologies not compatible with the proprietary technologies in place on your site (Flash and VBScript)?
It’s not 1995 anymore. It’s not okay for a business to run a site like this. It hurts customers and it hurts you. It is possible, even easy, to run a site that adheres to published Web standards. A site that works not only on the most popular browser but on every other browser on every other operating system, even on Web-enabled phones and PDAs.
I have a booking for four people to see Serenity today in UGC in Dublin, because their booking system works with every browser I have. I could have gone to IMC Dun Laoghaire, but my desktop machine in work doesn’t have flash installed so I couldn’t use your site. Then I tried on my laptop, an Apple Powerbook, and was thwarted by the use of VBScript (a language that only works on one browser and on one operating system: Internet Explorer for Windows) on your booking page.
Please. I’d like to have a choice of cinemas. I’d like not to have to go in to Dublin city to see a movie. Make it possible for me to book with you online and you will see my business. Until then, you will see me pass you by on my way to your competitors.
Fire
This evening I’ll be throwing heavy flaming sticks into the air and then trying to catch them again. That is, the Trinity Juggling Society is having a fire show, and I’ll be there. I’m actually not a huge fan of these fire shows (we call them ‘shows’ but really we just stand around juggling; there’s no preparation or routine or anything that you’d normally expect of a show) but I haven’t seen many of these people in months so I’m going to go and say hi. If you’re in the area (Trinity front square 7:30 to 9:30-ish this evening) and interested in seeing something shiny then come along and watch.
Attack of the Bacon Robots
I’m not a big comic fan but I do appreciate my thrice-weekly Penny Arcade. Good news then that the PA book Attack of the Bacon Robots is progressing nicely. Due for release in January.
Penny Arcade, the most popular Webcomic of all time, comes to you packaged in this compact, wireless, portable viewer that requires no batteries, no power cords or adapters, and never needs to be recharged! With this revolutionary technology you can access your favorite Penny Arcade strips anytime and anywhere through the awesome power of available light!
Family Guy News: Good and Bad
The bad news first, because I like to end on a good note. According to TV.com’s listings there won’t be any new Family Guy episodes airing until the 6th of November, and then there’s another break before the last of the current production season airs on the first of January next year. If you’re following along at home (ie. downloading) you should have seen 13 episodes this season. If you’re waiting to see them on TV, I’m afraid there’s still no air date for the BBC. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sky also picked up the new episodes but a brief search of press releases and newsgroups didn’t turn up any announcements on that front.
So the bad news is that we won’t see the Guy for a while, but the good news is that we will be seeing it for a while. Probably two years at least. According to The Futon Critic, Fox has ordered the production of 22 new episodes. That brings the total to 107, and total yet to air to 44. If these new episodes do get broadcast rather than just being released on DVD, and the current ratings suggest that they will, then Family Guy will be on TV until early 2008. Sweet.
Top 5: Video Game Characters
It’s been a while since the last installment of Top 5. I was working on another list but it didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped so I’ve filed it away carefully in /dev/null. I have to say that finding the right subjects to cover in these lists is harder than I first thought. The subject has to be one that people are interested in so that there’ll be some amount of arguing afterwards; it has to be broad enough that I’m not just listing the five things that qualify for the list; and it has to be narrow enough that I can have some hope of knowing what the hell I’m talking about.
So, throwing that last point (as well as all caution) aside, I’m going to try to list the Top 5 Video Game Characters. Try not to get too angry at me for getting this list so badly wrong.
5. Tails
Maybe Tails was less obvious than his more extroverted Hedgehog buddy Sonic, but that really added to his charm. Tails was content to hang back and let Sonic do all of the real work. He’d just saunter along behind the action, chipping in whenever he felt like it but never making a commitment. He was a symbol for our generation of free-loaders and coasters. And he could fly.
4. Heihachi Mishima
Given that many video games are aimed at the angry and hate-filled adolecent boy demographic, and that many of my game-playing years were spent as a memebr of that group, there’s inevitably going to be a skew in favour of ass-kicking, name-taking, hurt-locker-putting badasses. Heihachi is the Tekken series’ contribution. I joined the Tekken bandwagon at its third incarnation, where Heihachi stood out as the toughest SOB in the beat-em-up genre. I remember playing a versus battle with Heihachi and King that lasted about five seconds of the most bone-crunching moves in the game and ended very close to a double knock out, Heihachi barely the victor. Unfortunately I was using King. Even now in Tekken 5 when Heihachi is suppposed to be dead he can’t be beaten easily.
3. Sarge
Quake scared the shit out of me. The haunting noises of evil foes just around the corner, the dark shades of brown and grey in the deepest dungeons. I couldn’t bring myself to play it at night. None of it seemed really to bother the game’s protagonist, the hard-as-a-nailgun GI known as Sarge. Everything great about this character is summed up in the opening video of Quake 3, when you really think he can win against his crowd of foes even if he is only armed with a cigar. This is even before we consider that he’ll be played by The Rock in the Doom movie.
2. Sephiroth
Long black coat, cool-ass Japanese sword, chanting music in the background. The villain of Final Fantasy VII is himself most of the reason that it’s the best in the series. Nothing I can say will really evoke the awesome cool that radiates from this character during 70+ hours of playing FF7. Look for him in Advent Children.
1. Pac-Man
This is the second Namco entry on the list. Interestingly it has been rumoured that Pac-Man is actualy Heihachi Mishima’s biological father. Make of that what you will. He’s just a yellow disc with a wedge cut out of it but, as one magazine put it, he oozes more cool than a Zanussi in the arctic. He’s got an indellible retro chic, like a lava lamp that never went out of fashion. He’s also big business, being the most played arcade game in the world.
That’s my Top 5. What? No Mario, no Donkey Kong, no Street Fighter characters? No Ecco the Dolphin? Have I gone completely insane? You tell me. Who deserves to be on this list and who doesn’t?
Incidentally, I’m going to break with tradition and give a single honourable mention. This is the special category of ‘hottest video game character’, and my number one is Tanya from the Red Alert series. To hell with Lara Croft. Tanya, played by Kari Wuhrer in Red Alert 2, is the reason cut scenes were invented.
Go for the Juggler
As Jamie points out, Trinity College Juggling Society will be meeting again from this Tuesday. The UCD club has been meeting for the last three weeks too, although we’ve been juggling outside due to some room-booking clashes. Once the two clubs are back on form I’ll have two nights a week of three hours’ juggling per night.
Six hours a week is about as much as I did at the best of times during the summer, so I’ll be hoping to make some decent progress. I’m not going to try to enumerate my goals because every time I do that I end up either deciding that I don’t want to learn a particular trick or finding out that I haven’t a hope of learning it any time soon.
Having said that, I do have a single short-term goal to compete in the chin-balance (ie. club balanced on chin) endurance competition at the Tralee convention in November. Okay, so anyone who wants to can compete, but I’d like to be able to at least look like I have a chance of winning. This is phase one of my real plan, which is to win the same competition at the Dublin convention next March. At the Dublin convention this year I wasn’t able to do a chin balance at all, so going from that to winning in a year would be pretty cool.
Apart from that I’m not going to make any plans. I’ll see where whim takes me. Right now I’m working on five balls (I beat 100 catches on Saturday for the first time), six balls (I got 12 catches on Saturday, which technically means I juggled six for the first time), four clubs, and a nifty three ring trick where I throw one ring over my head and blind kick it back into the pattern. That trick drew a few compliments at the UCD meeting yesterday. That’s what I’m doing right now; who knows what I’ll be trying by the end of the year?
As for the title of this post, the joke goes: How do you kill a circus? Go for the juggler.