This Is The Future (and I'm Not Sure I'm Willing To Pay For It)

After reading Matt Springer’s take on the upcoming releases of Apple’s iTV and Google’s GoogleTV do-dads, I went back to my nagging thoughts of giving up my cable and going it alone with nothing but a computer, an internet connection and a prayer for my TV viewing habits.  Matt lays out pretty eloquently the pluses and minuses of each system, but there’s still one thing that keeps me dropping $60 to $100 a month* on my cable bill is live sports.  As both a pitiful Cubs fan and rather angry Bears fan (with a rabid Packers fan girlfriend), without precious cable we would probably be left in the cold with Apple’s set-top box and up to the whims (and fees) of the NFL & MLB with Google. I know that Major League Baseball currently offers an on-line video plan for a reasonable fee that gives you the ability to watch just about any game going on....except games that are blacked out in your area.  That’s no fucking help.  


My other concern is that if you find a way to get these games, legally, live on-line you will most likely still have to pay a nominal fee for them.  But you’ll still have to deal with the ads.  Part of the plus of iTV is that with your 99 cents, you buy your way out of having to watch commercials.  With live sports, you’re stuck with those commercials, or almost even worst, stuck watching a blank screen on your TV/computer while those ads role and the teams pick their noses on the sidelines.  And there’s the rub, even if you’re paying to not have ads, you’re still stuck with them, and that just bugs me.  If those advertisers are paying the NFL (and the TV station or on-line provider), why the hell am I going to compensate them a second time?  


I’m sure these concerns have been thought of at Google & Apple HQ, but I’m sure they’re waiting to see how the cards fall and whether the general public flees the increasingly higher and higher cable & satellite bills for the new frontier of the internet and whether they balk at the idea of paying both for access to the content and ads during the content they already paid for.  Hulu is already giving this a try with their new, $10 a month plan, but screw that.  If I’m paying them $120 a year, I ain’t putting up with commercials just so I can watch Ironside (Raymond Burr is the shit, y’all).  I could go on for a while, but I’ll save it for my usual soapboxing at the corner of LaGrange Rd. & Ogden Ave. between 4:30 & 5:00 PM, doing my best to drown out the suburban street preacher on the opposite corner.


*Depending upon whether the fine CSR at Comcast has pity on me and throws a deal at me

2010 Media Journal 1

Hey all, this year I'm going to attempt to post once a week with my thoughts about new comics/books/movies/TV shows I've read and seen each week. I probably won't post too many full-on reviews, but mostly just random thoughts associated with what I've been up to. Mostly this is to help me remember what I've been up to and also help organize my thoughts.

Comics

It was a slow week this week, with only one new release, but I took the opportunity to pick up a few books I had been eyeing.

20th Century Boys Vol. 2 - The near-universal acclaim that has been following this book on the internet made me very excited to pick it up, but the first volume left me kind of cold. It was certainly good, but it was a rather slow burn of a story and I didn't feel compelled to keep on going. Vol 2 still didn't make me a full-fledged addict, but it definitely has e eager to grab volume three. The only thing that bugged me about this volume is that it used a story-telling trick that has always bugged me. A character has information that is pertinent to the plot, he even tells other people this information, but the author covers up what he's saying so that the reveal is hidden from the reader. I understand that it's important to show the reader that the information has been discovered, but it just feels like such a tease.

Sugar Shock One-Shot: The shop was giving this one-shot by Joss Whedon & Fabio Moon out for free during their New Year's Eve Eve sale and it's a fun little book (collecting stories that were originally put up on MySpace). The story is about a punk-rock band called to perform (maybe) at a galactic battle of the bands and it reads lie The Amazing Joy Buzzards had it been written by Whedon. There's not to muc heft there, but certainly worth the price I paid.

TV

Doctor Who: The End of Time 1 & 2: Though I'm not a huge Doctor Who fan, David Tennant's run on the series has been a favorite of mine and these final two episodes were certainly very good, if a tad melancholy. A lot of people on twitter were complaining that the Doctor came off rather unheroic as he met his end, especially compared with his direct predecessor, however it felt fitting to me. Tennant's Doctor always was the reluctant hero who seemed that he'd always prefer be out having fun instead of saving the universe, so his final words seemed right to me. Also, Timothy Dalton chewed the hell out of the scenery in that episode and probably took some home in a to-go container.

Re-watched the ending of Battlestar: Galactica this week and was still really impressed with it, though I could have done without the "present day" coda. Still, really good.

Can't think of too much else I watched other than a few bowl games and repeated watchings of this one episode of The Batman that my youngest has become fascinated with.

Movies:

For Christmas I got myself a Blu-ray player that also is compatible with Netflix Watch Instantly, so I'm going to be watching a lot of movies, some of which will not be very good, such as:

American Ninja: BeaucoupKevin was twittering about watching this yesterday ad so I threw it on late last night, thinking I'd be asleep in a few minutes. But shit, it was fascinating. In discussing it on twitter, Kevin said that it was "such an artifact" and it was. It hearkened back to watching awful movies just like it on cable on at my friends' houses back in grade school. Plus, there was a ninja that shot lasers at the end, that shit was off the hook.

Chocolate: The plot of this Thai martial arts movie: an autistic girl is able to repeat just about any movement she sees someone perform, so fo course she watches a bunch kung-fu movies so she can go collect the money owed to her former-gangster-mother in order to pay for her mother's cancer medicine. It was shockingly not nearly as exploitative as I thought it would end up being and was quite a good movie.

So that's about it for this week. Hopefully I'll have more for you in seven days.

Favorite Things II - Day 7

A few months ago, I wrote a post talking about my problems with Fringe. Fortunately, most of my problems were solved through the remainder of the first season, opening up the series universe(s) to show where creator JJ Abrams and co. were going with the show. The thing I like most about the show, and something it shares with his previous show, Alias, is that he's not afraid to blow up the shows status quo from season to season. Initially, we thought The Pattern was to be the big bad of the show, the enemy for our heroes to fight each week, but by the end, The Pattern were shown to be much more complicated than previously thought and then pushed aside to show what the true enemy was: another Earth, one that wants to take over our own.

Throughout this, they've kept the stuff I liked, Crazy Walter is still crazy, but his madness has been deepened and given reason, something that just about anyone can understand. Peter's mysteriousness has been given an edge, one that the character himself doesn't yet understand. And Olivia has been further humanized, both by the inclusion of her sister and the fact they've since allowed her to smile once or twice.

I've really been enjoying the second season thus far, though I could have done without the baseball playoffs throwing a wrench into the scheduling, but it's quickly risen to be one of my must watch shows. Glad to know there's something that will still keep me guessing in a few months once Lost is gone.

What Bugs Me About Fringe: Part One

You know, I've started this post two or three times and just never gotten around to finishing it, but seeing the promos for the second half of Fringe's first season really solidified something in my mind. The thing that bugs me the most is that fucking robot arm. In the first episode, when Olivia met with the suit from Massive Dynamics (can't remember her name, but it might as well be Deus Ex Machina), to show the benevolence of the company's owner, she shows off the nifty robot arm he gave her to replace the one she lost to cancer.

See, with The X-Files being one of my favorite TV series ever, it's obvious that I'll make comparisons, seeing as how they're pretty much the same, ie. FBI Agents exploring weird shit. However, The X-Files always went out of their way to make things somewhat plausible. At the end of the day, most of the stories could be explained by delusion or some other, real-world type of explanation, and even the more fantastical stuff was grounded in a some form of reality. Hell, the aliens in the show didn't run around blasting each other with lasers...fuck no! They stabbed each other in the neck with ice picks.

But in Fringe, that robot arm showed that all bets were off, we were no longer grounded in reality and in full on, sci-fi zone. This show does not take place in anything close to the "real" world (unless you listen to a lot of Coast to Coast AM), and it does not have to play by the physical rules as we know them. Once I saw that, I just started to care less. It's not that it resides in that zone, it's that it went out its way to flaunt it in its first episode. Take Fringe's older brother, Lost. A show it is obviously meant to be a companion to (the in-jokes leading me to believe that they even take place in the same "universe"), Lost, though dealing in the fantastical as well, didn't delve into the full-on, anything can happen, sci-fi realm before its third season, when it had earned the audience's trust through a lot of very good story-telling. In my mind, it had earned that leap. Everyone who was watching had seen the clues along the way, the polar bear, the subtle time-shifts, the smoke monster. But at any time, there could have been a "rational" explanation. Then they took the plunge and it worked. It just seemed cheap to me that Fringe took that leap without earning it, like they took the believability of the series for granted.

Ah, what do I know, I'm just some crank on the internet. Plus I keep watching, but really, I can't deny the awesomeness of crazy-Walter. I wish the show was just about him.

Yes, apparently, this is the first in a possible series, as there are some other things that bug me about Fringe and I will continue to keep venting them at you until you go to everyone of my Amazon affiliate links and buy all of the shit that I am pushing on you.

My Idea for The Next Season of "24"

I used to love 24, but last season's torture-porn outing kind of turned me off from the series. Lately, I've been re-watching some of the seasons on DVD and I think I figured out where they should go from here - Jack Bauer should become the villain. Let's face it, they guy's been pushed over the edge far too many times to remain mentally balanced, and this would give us a villain we could finally get into the head of, instead of our usual Mulim/Russian/Bauer-family-member that are about as deep as cardboard cut-outs.

Here's how I'd plot it out. Evil asshole VP Powers Boothe is now President (I realize he ended last season seeming not to be as big of an asshole as we thought, but run with me - this would also work with Pres. Sherri Palmer). During another investigation, it comes to the attention of someone in CTU that he (asshole former VP, now known as AHFVP) may have been involved with Pres. Palmer's assassination. Someone in CTU (ie. Chole or Audrey) relays this info to Jack while he's on somewhere washing dishes and generally living the life of a crazy-hermit. At this point, Chole/Audrey is killed by someone close to the AHFVP for relaying this info. From this point on, Jack Bauer decides that the President must die. I would frame this all happening one day in New York city where the Pres. is making a campaign appearance. During the same day, CTU is in NYC making the afforementioned terror bust. After his friend's death, Jack makes it clear to someone in CTU (Buchanan? I know he's out, maybe Jack can call him for advice) what he's going to do. From there on, it's a cat and mouse chase through New York with CTU trying to stop the assassination, following up on the info about the VP themselves, trying to keep it from other gov't agencies that one of "their own" has gone rogue , along with a possible pararllell assassination plot from another faction. I think this would be great. It'd give us a great villain, give us a reason to stop all the damn torture, plus, whoever is hunting Bauer could be set up as a future 24 hero should the series continue without Sutherland. Fox, send me a damn check!