GlennLog

Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo

August 22, 2010

New Geek Book/Comic/Movie/TV Club Podcast

The Incomparable! A regular media critique podcast by geeks, for geeks, about geeky stuff. Jason Snell, Macworld magazine's editorial director, is the evil genius behind it. A rotating cast of Igors, van Heslings, Doctor's companions, and red shirts killed late in the episode will fill out the cast.

Our first discussion: sci-fi novels. Yeah, I say sigh-fie. I don't care who says skiffy.

From the show notes for episode 1:

The Incomparable Participants: Glenn Fleishman, Scott McNulty, Dan Moren, and Jason Snell. The Incomparable Theme Song composed by Christopher Breen.

Prominently mentioned in this Incomparable episode:

• "The City & The City" by China Miéville
• "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi
• "For the Win" by Cory Doctorow

Oh, we're going to talk about the Doctor in a future episode. Don't you worry. Ah ha ha ha ha mwah ha ha.

Posted by Glennf at 7:14 PM

August 13, 2010

Gee Eff

The Economist doesn't publish bylines in its regular weekly edition, but its blog does post initials. You'll a "G.F." for this entry.

Posted by Glennf at 9:04 AM

July 18, 2010

Futurama, Brain Slugs, and Los Angeles

One of my favorite television shows is Futurama, an animated sci-fi farce full of subtle and gross (really gross) references to the entire history of the short-story, novel, comic-book, animated, and film genre.

In a neat coincidence, the show was co-created and is co-produced by David X Cohen, the brother of my dear friend Sarah. The show has gone through ups and downs, having seen four seasons on Fox TV, where the network jerked around the schedule so much that even fans had trouble finding it.

Re-runs found their way to cable (Adult Swim on Cartoon Network), where they were incredibly popular, and DVDs sold quite well, from what I've read.

A smarter sister of Fox's broadcast network (20th Century Fox Television) commissioned four Futurama movies, which were then aired on Comedy Central (which secured the rights) as four 4-parters.

This, then, helped lead to a new order of shows: 26! Which started airing on Comedy Central as of a few weeks ago.

I'd wanted to visit Sarah, who lives in Los Angeles, for quite a while, and she held out the lure of Futurama table readings. A table reading is where the actors on a show or film read the script. I planned to go down last November, but caught a mild case of pneumonia--so mild, that it took me a while to figure it out. I had to postpone.

Sarah told me a few weeks ago that the last three scheduled reading dates had been set for the final scripts in the current order. (I am privy to no exceptional knowledge: Comedy Central committed to 26 episodes for this "season," which will air over a couple of years, but the show hasn't been "canceled" again, nor are new episodes on order yet.)

Even better (for my purposes), the last of three table readings was almost guaranteed to happen, because it would be a special event for the cast, crew, and their families and friends. I said, "sold!", checked with Lynn, booked tickets and a hotel near Sarah, and held my breath.

The first two of the three readings were, in fact, canceled, but the final one happened on July 15 in Century City on the Fox lot. There was a big crowd in a moderate sized conference rooms. The actors were all at one end of the table and writers and other staff mostly at the other end. David's wife and a friend of hers were also attending, and they, Sarah, and I got prime seats behind the actors. (I have a full set of photos on Flickr you can view.)

Now, for the folks in the room, this was part of their work day, even though it was an important milestone. The show I heard read won't be ready to air for as long as two years from now, and they'll be working quite hard through April 2011 with what's on their plates. The actors will come back to record and re-record, and so the final script is nothing like the end of their working relationship.

Still, it was a special day, and everyone was in fine spirits. On entering Building 1, we were greeted by brain slug cupcakes. The reading lasted under an hour, and people lingered to talk and take pictures.

I knew one of the actors: Phil LaMarr, who Sarah and I had gone to college with (he was a couple of years ahead). Phil has done quite well: he did a stint in the Groundlings, a legendary L.A. comedy troupe (akin to Second City in Chicago), and was a founding actor on Mad TV, appearing there for several years. He's done a vast amount of voice acting, including Samurai Jack in the eponymous series, and Green Lantern on the various Justice League shows. Phil's also the guy in Pulp Fiction who gets shot by accident in the backseat. He plays Hermes Conrad on Futurama. We caught up a bit.

I can't disclose details of the script (they're juicy!), but it contained elements in different styles, giving the actors a workout. The bonhomie in the room was at a high level: everyone laughed long and hard, John Dimaggio hardest of all--and that man can laugh. Yes, he laughs like Bender. (An LA friend of my wife's suggested I could tell the agents in the room by who laughed the hardest, but everyone had tears in their eyes from guffawing.)

David took Sarah and I around to meet all the actors, and I was able to snag a photo with Tress Macneille, voice of most of the female characters on the show except for Amy (Lauren Tom) and Leela (sitcom veteran Katy Sagal).

I also met Life in Hell/Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who developed Futurama with David (who was a scriptwriter and showrunner on The Simpsons), and is the co-executive producer. We chatted a bit about Powell's Books of all things.

I curse the fact that although Sarah and I hung out and talked with Phil and Billy West for some time afterwards, I didn't think to get a picture with Billy, who is one of the most versatile voice actors in the business, as well as being a serious musician.

It would have been worth the trip to see my dear friend, but the reading was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me, and what a hoot.

Afterwards, Sarah and I went to the Huntington Botanical Gardens, where it the stated temperature in Pasadena was 95°, but it was likely well over 100° there. Well worth it--among the best botanical gardens I've ever visited, with a staggeringly good desert garden.

Posted by Glennf at 5:28 PM

June 19, 2010

Stop Reading This Post and Get To Work

I became interested several months ago in the idea of what struck me as "software jiu-jitsu": using programs that prevented you from using other programs or accessing the Internet. I pitched this to my regular editor at The Economist, and, lo, it appeared in the 10 June 2010 issue as "Stay on Target" in the Technology Quarterly section. (I love the illustration, as I love all the TQ illustrations, I believe always by the same person, Belle Mellor.)

My editor tells me that it was a popularly read article this last week, which isn't too surprising. What's the best way to pass time that you should spend doing something productive? Reading about ways to make yourself more productive.

I kid.

I didn't mention it in the article, but it was written using Isolator. I couldn't seem to focus on what I needed to write about (how self-referential), so I fired up a few programs to test, and decided Isolator would keep me on track. I believe it took 2 to 3 hours to write a solid draft, and it seemed too easy--perhaps the joy of focus.

Posted by Glennf at 1:23 PM

May 11, 2010

People Want an Opportunity to Be Kind

I was reminded of the casual kindness of living in Seattle when I got on the 48 bus this morning with Rex. Now, Rex is beautiful and hilarious and cute as all get out, and I was dressed in brightly colored bike gear. But lots of unprovoked niceness. The bus was packed, and everyone was offering us a seat; I demurred (since Rex liked the unusual opportunity to stand), but was very thankful.

Rex's nose was gushing, and I had failed to bring any tissues with me--I'm normally packing kleenex everywhere. As soon as I got on, a young woman pulled out a pile of tissues and handed them over.

I was slightly overwhelmed in a funny way. The 48 is a work and school route: it's full of people with purpose. It was 9 in the morning. And people were apparently charmed by my companion, and looking for an opportunity to do something nice.

This makes life good.

Thank you.

Posted by Glennf at 10:11 PM

April 9, 2010

The Hardest Thing I Do Each Week

The hardest thing I do each week is not some kind of writing or professional work. I love what I do, even when it's sometimes overwhelming, sometimes frustrating, sometimes boring. Mostly, I like telling stories about how things work, and how they affect people who use them.

The hardest thing I do each week doesn't involve my children, Rex and Ben, who are wonderful and exasperating and magnificent.

The hardest thing I do each week is not get up in the morning (any morning).

The hardest thing I do each week is have a swim lesson.

I do not know how to swim, though that is changing. I don't fault my parents, who tried to get me trained up as a kid. My mom swam well and was a lifeguard at some point in her early life.

It never took. I was simply too afraid of being suspended in water and being underwater. I would go into pools and splash about, but I never liked being underwater, and I never got to a point where I could even float.

After a decade or more of saying, geez, I should just learn to swim, I watched Ben progress in his lessons over the last several months, and signed up at his swim place with his marvelous instructor. Who a few weeks later moved away, more's the pity!

But I got in four lessons with him, and have had about three with another fellow at the same instruction place. In the first three lessons, I made more progress than in 30 years. I stalled a bit, no surprise, but today, I was able to float more or less unsupported for what I think was the first time ever.

I have a very odd center of buoyance, so that my float position is apparently unlike anything the swim instructor has seen before (legs half bent, under water, yet, I am floating). A normal float for most people does nothing for me.

I look forward to and have trepidation for each lesson, but today was a pretty huge milestone.

Posted by Glennf at 8:20 AM

January 25, 2010

Museum Fall/Fail

An American (horrors) tripped at MoMA and tore a hole in Picasso's The Actor, possibly because of a raised floor barrier.

This reminded me of a couple museum stories of my own.

Back at Yale (pause for Gaudeamus Igitur to play), I took the introduction to art history course taught by the marvelous and rightly legendary teacher and art thinker Vincent Scully. He has taught several decades of Elis how to understand art from a classical perspective that informs even the most post-modern of post-modern works. (Everything is a reaction to everything else.)

I recall him telling a story once about a painting that was so compelling that he said you were compelled to lean farther and farther into the painting, until you tripped the alarm, and large Samoan guards came and beat you to death. Surprised uproarious laughter. "It happened to me more than once," he said, to additional laughter.

In 2000, when Lynn and I went to a haphazardly organized reunion of the Yale Summer Program in Graphic Design in Brissago, Switzerland, we stayed in Basel, a great city for art, with hundreds of museums in the city and in nearby towns and across the borders of Germany and France.

We went to the Kunstmuseum in Basel, an institution with a host of seminal works (a room of Picassos, Der Blaue Reiter painting that defined Der Blaue Reiter movement), and they had what I remember was a Cy Twombly exhibit of paintings and sculpture. This particular exhibit was mostly beige monochromatic, and occupied an entire floor.

Now, for security purposes, the museum had put security tape on the floor. Cross the tape, and a buzzer sounded. For unknown reasons, the museum had chosen to use a tape that was essentially the same color as the floor, and place the tape at irregular distances from the works being protected.

Lynn and I walked around and continually, accidentally triggered the buzzers. We were, I think, just about the only people besides the guards on the floor. The guards were understanding--this was happening constantly--and it turned into a joke. It was like an interactive audio experiment. Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!

The last time I was the Louvre, I did not fall into the Mona Lisa. But I did notice that the famous painting was so heavily protected by glass and alarms that it was nearly impossible to see, in addition to the crush of people around it. Other Da Vinci masterpieces were nearby with no one looking at them, and no protection whatsoever.

Posted by Glennf at 1:17 PM | Comments (3)

January 3, 2010

Doctor Who End of Time

Yes, spoilers. Super super geeky content follows.

I'm still thinking about the end of David Tennant's tenancy as Doctor Who in the two-part End of Time episodes.

We don't know much about the Doctor's past, although the Master talks about he and the Doctor playing in the fields of the Master's family estates. So perhaps there were parents (although other parts of the canon make this more complicated).

It appears from clues in the episodes that a time lord who appears on cue to Wilfred multiple times, and as one of two dissenters in the vote on destroying the universe at the end, is the doctor's mother. (It's totally unclear how she shows up so many times when she is in disgrace and was already in the Time War's time lock.)

My original theory, before the very end of End of Time, was that Wilfred was a time lord who had passed through the Chameleon Arch, and was unaware of his own identity, just like the Master was in his Professor Yana garb, and the Doctor as John Smith (also a professor! or don, at least).

I figured that the doctor's mother (we figured that out later) appearing was actually a manifestation of his hidden nature, and that calling him Old Soldier was a kind of code word that was supposed to awaken his interest in some object, like a watch.

Instead, Wilfred is just who he was: an honest, sometimes terrified, perfectly decent human being. The Doctor is undone not by the Master or some race of super-intelligent cyborgs. Rather, he gives up his incarnation because he must do the right thing in the face of someone doing the right thing.

In earlier episodes, the Doctor is always reaching out a hand to even the worst of his enemies: he is always trying to save the Master. He said to Davros that he tried to save him as he flew into the jaws of the Nightmare Child (something that we will probably never know what was meant by); he tries to save Davros after the Doctor's duplicate kills all the Daleks.

So how much worse to have a good man, by his own goodness, require saving?

The actions of the Doctor's double in the Dalek Reality Bomb episodes is finally explained in part in the End of Time. The double kills all the Daleks in a single act with little forethought. Donna tries to stop him, saying, shouldn't we wait for the Doctor? And the double says, "I am the Doctor." Which is true. He is as the Doctor was when he ended the Time War.

The Doctor later shunts his double to be Rose's partner in a parallel world, and he explains that he was born in war and fire, and that his nature is equal to the same. The folks who monitor Doctor Who continuity posit that the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) was regenerated during the Time War, so born in the same spirit. (The 10th Doctor, David Tennant, says as much.)

The Doctor mourns the end of the time lords, but he also knew he had no choice. Had he not destroyed his own people and the Daleks in the Time War, then the Time Lords would have destroyed time (becoming somehow pure consciousness in the absence of time and space). The Dalek leader, Davros, having been plucked out of the Time War, tries to destroy all matter--a mimicry of the Time Lords, like all the Dalek actions in the series--making the Daleks the only life force in all universes.

There's an odd bit with Timothy Dalton as the president of the Time Lords. First, most of his acting appears to have been blue screen, which is too bad, because he gave a hell of performance, although it fell slightly flat because of his lack of interaction with almost any other person directly in front of him. He was still great.

There's a neat part of the president's role that's buried: the Doctor calls him Rassilon in the moment when he's broken the link, sending the time lords back to the Time War. Perhaps this the snake eating its own tail, because Rassilon is the founder of the time lords.

Perhaps Rassilon was revived to lead the time lords in the war, just as the Master explains his returned existence to being resurrected by the time lords to fight as a relentless warrior. (Instead, when the Dalek Emperor was in his ascendancy, he fled to the very end of time.)

What's most profound about the last episode are two elements. First, the Doctor is given some grace to have what he calls his reward: he travels around and saves some companions' lives, and aids Donna Noble's financial condition, while finishing up by saying goodbye to Rose before she's met him. In previous regenerations, as I recall the ones I saw, the Doctor has moments, if that. (In one, the previous actor apparently refused to appear in the regeneration scene.)

Second, this Doctor doesn't want to go peacefully. Christopher Eccleston's Doctor wasn't ready--it wasn't clear how long he had even had the current body. But he watched Rose nearly sacrifice herself to save the Earth's future (and probably beyond), and thus was willing to accept his fate.

David Tennant didn't go quietly into that good night. He looks slightly off camera, and says, nearly tearfully, "I don't want to go." And then regeneration happens, violently, seemingly nearly destroying the craft.

I thought for just one moment: did the producers fool us all? Was Tennant going to stay on, become a dark Doctor, provoke a huge crisis? But, no, he had no choice, the Doctor. He wasn't ready to die, and off he went.

And like his predecessors, the new Doctor doesn't remember the existential angst and what-all. He's just a new man with old memories and off he goes.

In the past, there have been interstitial bits of a several minutes long shown after Christmas episodes that explain part of a transition, made to be shown for a UK charity. We may get a few minutes more from Tennant yet, although I doubt it. (Jason Snell tells me that these appear before the Christmas specials, which is right on--he suggests maybe November 2013, the 50th anniversary of the first airing of the show.)

One more thing: many blogs and reviews are saying the Master was destroyed or died when he attacked Rassilon as the Doctor severed the link bringing back Gallifrey and the time lords. I've watched the ending a few times: it's pretty clear that this is an entirely open issue. The Master may have been brought back to Gallifrey; may have died; may be in an entirely different state altogether.

Posted by Glennf at 5:00 PM | Comments (3)

December 23, 2009

The Modern Driveway Moment

Public radio has this thing they call a driveway moment. (Oh, Mary, mother of God, it's not just something they call a driveway moment, it's something they have obtained a service mark for--so it's a Driveway Moment[sm].)

Anyway, the idea is that you are listening to a story so compelling that when you arrive at your destination, like your home driveway, instead of turning off the radio (how quaint, listening to a live broadcast but that's the demographic), you sit in your car and listen to the rest of the piece.

There are a lot of implications in that which have to do with the driveway. You drive a car. You have a driveway. You have the time (or will make the time) to sit in the car instead of going instead. You got it: 40-60 year old Caucasians living in suburbs.

Anyway, again, the modern driveway moment is different for me. I plug my iPhone into an integrated car stereo which charges and plays back content directly. I listen to a podcast; this morning, it was one of my favorite NPR productions, Planet Money, which exists only as a podcast with some pieces also being aired.

I arrived at my destination, and the piece is so interesting, I don't stay in the car. I unhook the iPod, plug in my headphones, and listen to the rest of the podcast as I walk to work. When I arrive at work, I dock the iPod and continue to play it, now through speakers in the office.

What's that? The Intermodal Playback Moments? I don't know what to call it.

Posted by Glennf at 9:26 AM

December 20, 2009

Where Is Waldo, Anyway?

It was quiet in the other room. Too quiet. What are the kids doing? READING! Woo hoo! Well, sort of. Eye strain for Where's Waldo.

Posted by Glennf at 9:08 PM | TrackBack (0)