Category: TV

Shelf Life
Eventually, Everything is Bits. Even you.
And Everything has a shelf life, even shelves.
My shelves are experiencing an accelerating half life – a shelfular singularity if you like. Books, photos, movies, music and games now inhabit the clouds, pixellated, digitised and discless. My media genome is now scattered across many heavenly shelves…
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Moving pictures took almost two years to turn from these…
into this: (their corporeal forms now grace the shelves of charity stores)

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Then came the kindling of the pages, turning most of these…
…into things that could be in many places, but mostly in two.
Those that couldn’t make the journey, remain neither wholly binary or atomic.
—

Along the way, I started foresaking these…
…and adopting their etheral brothers, though some still remain in limbo:
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The most precious, began as atoms, then light, before becoming embalmed in silver hallide…
… and now existing as blocks of light, coarsing through slices of silcon, behind sheets of glass some livpure:

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My shelves will soon be emptied and no longer required. I don’t own those in distant clouds, but I do own those in the computers that belong to me. I have one, where I own none of the contents, nor the shelf itself… and it hurts when it’s altered without consent.
Is this Better Than Owning? Perhaps.
The absence of atoms isn’t problematic, but my senses can’t yet fully appreciate and comprehend all the bits in all those new places…
October 6, 2011
Y, El Último Hombre
This week's episode of Lost – '316' – features a gratuitously self-referential shot of Hurley reading Y, El Último Hombre, the Spanish language edition of Y: The Last Man, written in 2004 by one of Lost's current principal writers, Brian K. Vaughn…
Nothing's ever a coincidence in the Lostiverse. Hurley is reading the fourth volume, One Small Step, a story with a very Planet of the Apes ending…what does that mean?!
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Y: The Last Man is currently being adapted into a movie trilogy, but I've always thought it'd make for a great Abrams-esque TV quest 🙂
February 20, 2009
Star Trek
I should be depressed. I should be indignant. I should be angry.
Alongside Bruce Wayne, James Tiberius Kirk was my fictional childhood hero, how can anyone, anyone but The Shat play Kirk?? Oddly, though Batman has been played by countless brilliant, middling and appalling actors, my fanboy-ity for Batman has remained undiminished. But Kirk is Shatner and can only be played by someone with a suitably monstrous ego!
And yet, I feel no Kirk Anxiety watching the trailer for JJ Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek. I just want to squee with fanboy excitement when I see the shiny-shiny production design, the billion-fireflies transporter FX and Michael Giacanno‘s screechy Lost-esque strings – so, in the opening desert chase, what’re the huge buildings in the distance and what’s with the giant quarry?
Regardless, seeing the new Kirk and Spock together, as above, fills me with excitement and perhaps shows that the iconic Kirk can be inhabited by a new actor…let’s just hope he can still do this, this, that, this and this 😉
November 17, 2008
Dr. Horrible…
…Why No Serie-us? Aspiring super-villain Dr. Horrible wants to join
the Evil League of Evil and win the girl of his dreams, but his
nemesis, Captain Hammer…
July 31, 2008
‘Earth’
‘…we finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!‘
June 16, 2008
Colonel Saul Tigh
Complicit in fixing an election, organising a campaign of suicide-bombing in response to a military occupation, the extra-judicial execution of collaborators and the imposition of martial law following a military coup, Saul Tigh is one of the most badass, unlikeable and yet tragically, deeply and heroically flawed characters on television today.
In spite of this, Tigh – perfectly written and wonderfully played by Michael Hogan – commands our sympathy through a haze of alcoholism. Revelations of his experiences as a teenage soldier in a brutal war, his gentle execution of his wife Ellen as a collaborator and the damning revelation of his Cylon heritage enable us to him to be seen as man with a broken soul...
“You know, sometimes I think that you’ve got ice water in those
veins, and other times I think you’re just a naive little
schoolteacher. I’ve sent men on suicide missions in two wars now, and
let me tell you something. It don’t make a Godsdamn bit of difference
whether they’re riding in a Viper or walking out onto a parade ground,
in the end they’re just as dead. So take your piety and your moralizing
and your high-minded principles and stick ’em someplace safe until
you’re off this rock and you’re sitting in your nice cushy chair on
Colonial One again. I’ve got a war to fight.” Precipice
"My name is Saul Tigh, I am an officer in the Colonial Fleet. Whatever
else I am, whatever else it means, that’s the man I want to be. And if
I die today, that’s the man I’ll be." Crossroads: Part II
{ Artwork courtesy of Grant Gould }
May 19, 2008
He That Believeth In Me

John 11:25-26 – "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me,
though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and
believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?"
Battlestar Galactica‘s story arcs have always drawn dark and uncomfortable parallels with the War on Terror – themes of occupation, apocalypse, suicide bombing, resistance, extra-judicial justice, abortion, monotheism vs. polytheism, prophecy and civilian vs. military governance. This ‘dark mirror’ has made BSG one of the most potently sophisticated political storytelling vehicles on television – more so even than The West Wing.
The opening episode of season four, He That Believeth In Me, deep-dives into the painfully isolating nature of prophecy. As showrunner Ronald D. Moore points out – When somebody really is a
prophet or a seer or a visionary…they’re
shunned, rejected, ignored…people who have a genuine foreknowledge or greater awareness generally don’t have a good
life…’

I can’t help see the show as anything other than the story of a withering Machine Jihad that seeks to replace humanity as the children of God. Yet in the process of euthanising its parent culture, belatedly realises that it seeks human acceptance and wonders – to paraphrase Moore – ‘What if they’re like us and we’ve been doing all these terrible things this whole time…if they could have created us so
easily, what does that say about how special we are…maybe we’re not touched by God
either…maybe we’re some sort of fairly easy technological accident.’ Indeed, this introspection gives rise to machine atheism!
My interpretation is an inversion of Moore’s story which is essentially oriented around humanity and it’s struggle to comprehend that their greatest fear isn’t that their offspring aren’t human – but that they are and that turning inwards against each one other is a more potent existential threat than the Cylons.
In reading Wired’s piece today on Ray Kurzweil’ notion of the Singularity, I can’t help but wonder that in seeking to create machine consciousness, modeled on our own understanding of human consciousness, that we sow the seeds for inevitable spirituality arising amongst machines. Perhaps Battlestar Galactica is actually the most sophisticated piece of Singularity fiction since Blade Runner, raising not only provocative parallels to current events, but forcing viewers to consider what it means to be human.
April 14, 2008
A dedicated iPlayer?

Last week the BBC announced the launch of it’s iPlayer service for the Nintendo Wii, hot on the heels of iPhone and iPod touch support last month. It’s great to see the BBC supporting so many platforms just a couple of months after the launch of the service and addresses the irony of having iPlayer available for every platform other than TV itself!
However iPlayer on Wii is said to be slow and jerky when running fullscreen, so I got to thinking about how difficult it’d be to create a dedicated iPlayer set-top box…
An Apple TV hacked to run full OSX is about the same cost as a Wii and includes handy support for a remote control, mouse or keyboard…you won’t even need to trick your browser’s user agent string into spoofing an iPhone or a Wii as the video and page format doesn’t really vary.
Now if I had a £180 to spare, I’d give it a whirl…
UPDATE: Sadly, though Playstation 3 can play embedded Flash clips from YouTube, it
doesn’t seem to be able to cope with iPlayer (perhaps a later version
of Flash) and I haven’t figured how to hack the PS3 browser’s user
agent string.
April 14, 2008
It’s like a photo, but it moves!
Here’s my first Flickr video – from a visit to Boston in 2002 🙂
There’s been a lotta whining and grousing about the launch of video for Flickr Pro users today, with criticism largely polarising around the 90-second limit or elitist fears of a YouTube-style pollution of the pristine Flickr community. I these concerns will be largely unfounded…
- I suspect most users will be recording video ‘before and after’ a photo is taken. Perhaps such a contextualising video to accompanying a Flickr photo will be seen in time as no different than geotagging an image…it’s just extra contexty 🙂
- Brevity in video is maybe not a bad thing. 140 character limits on Twitter have only enhanced the creativity of that community…
- Flickr’s full of good and bad photographers. There’s no reason to assume they’ll be any more or less skilled at ‘videography’. The Flickr community is actually very good at collectively surfacing the best contributions and with video only available to Pro users, that’ll act as an additional filter.
- Flickr’s a little more personal than YouTube- it’s largely photos for friends and family, rather than a wider broadcast. You’re more likely to see cute clips of a friend’s niece – like this – than a trailer for Iron Man.
I tend to shoot a handful of videos with my point & shoot or phone when I’m taking a whole lotta photos. When I’m looking at the photos of my nephew’s first visit, it makes sense to me that all the related media is contextualised in the same place, by the same application. I don’t wanna create a mashup, I just want to post.
I think Flickr made the right choices…now I’m just hoping I’ll be able to MMS video from my phone to Flickr real soon 🙂
April 10, 2008
I’m A Muslim, Get Me Out Of Here!
I’m A Muslim, Get Me Out Of Here! Uhuh, that’s exactly what I was feeling just minutes into last night’s opening episode of Channel 4’s Make Me A Muslim…it may as well have been called Jihad Factor, Strictly Forbidden or X-Terrorist.
It seems the contestants learned nothing about the belief structure of Islam or the very personal, spiritual journey of belief in any religion, but simply the superficial, surface elements of being Muslim; how to dress, eat and avoid alcohol. As noted by the Telegraph ‘the place of Islam could just as easily have been taken by
an Edwardian house or a 1950s school‘.
By focusing simply on the outward appearance and behavior of Muslims, the four Imams appeared ridiculously irrelevant to modern life, rapidly alienating pretty much all the participants. In turn the producers managed to contrive situations for maximum conflict…
- Selecting Harrogate as the backdrop – a place which is about as mono-cultural as a British town can get. Why not places of some diversity like London, Manchester or Birmingham?
- Choosing four imams who were unable to give reasoned, non-judgemental, rational theological explanations…and who largely looked that they’d been dressed by Hamas.
- Setting up a gay man with an imam that had zero understanding of homosexuality. Whilst ‘Mohammed’ prowled the streets of Harrogate trying to hook up the poor guy with a girl, his counterpart setup the hapless fella on a date with a cricket team! Upon being told he dressed too effeminately for a man, he told ‘Suleyman’ that the shalwar he wore looked kinda like a dress…touché!
- Encouraging a glamour model to shop from Pakistani fashion stores in Bradford to look more ‘Islamic’, ignoring the fact that most Muslim women in the UK shop from the same places as everyone else!
- Ignoring the plight of a Christian woman involved with a Muslim man who’s family refuse to acknowledge her. Here was a story where the potential to overcome bigotry with Islam’s tolerance was overlooked in favour of a disingenuous argument on how Muslims are seeking to ‘impose’ Sharia in ‘our’ country.
The programme’s creators and the imams presented Islam as a mono-cultural experience, ignoring the reality that there’s a diversity of beliefs and cultures into which Islam has adapted, including Britain.

Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days – Muslims In America was a much more dignified study of Islam’s applicability in the West. David Stacy, a Christian American, lived with an American Muslim family for a month and though he struggled to locate his own theological beliefs within Islam, he found much in common with Islamic family life and the basic humanity of being Muslim.
Both David and the Muslim family came away with dignity and an increased respect for one another’s beliefs.
A considered, intelligent, journalistic and respectful tone results in shows like 30 Days. When the motive is conflict, drama and ratings, then you can’t expect much more than the crap that was Make Me A Muslim.
December 17, 2007