Author: Otaku-kun

  • Wii + Netflix = geek rapture

    forget the Singularity (bah, humbug) – the real moment of transcendence approacheth. I just saw via @arstechnica that Netflix discs for Wii owners are being shipped out. Should have mine by next week!

    This is bad news for Roku, because I was literally about to buy one when I first learned of Netflix on Wii. I still might be persuaded to buy a popbox eventually, but the Netflix/Wii combo will suffice for some time.

    UPDATE: I just got the email from Netflix – my disc will arrive tomorrow. Don’t forget to grab yours at http://netflix.com/wii for free!

    Also – the Netflix blog has a cheery blurb:

    Jessie Becker here from Marketing and we’ve got some great news to share. We are in the final phase of getting ready for the launch of streaming to Wii. Today, we shipped out instant streaming discs for the Wii to some of our Netflix members. Their feedback will ensure that we deliver a great experience to everyone when we launch. Instantly watching movies and TV episodes from Netflix via Wii will be available soon at no additional cost – all you need is a Netflix unlimited plan starting at $8.99 a month, a Wii console and a broadband Internet connection. If you have reserved your disc already, you don’t need to do anything – we will send you an email as soon as we ship the disc. If you haven’t, reserve your disc today at www.netflix.com/Wii and stay tuned for a launch announcement!

  • Firefly rewatch

    Tor is doing a Firefly rewatch and they have the first episode (“Serenity”) up. Reading the plot synopsis really brought back the sheer density of memorable events – I think the reviewer is right that in many ways, “Serenity” the episode made for a better movie than “Serenity” the movie. Then again, part of what made it work as a pilot was the fast pace. Were it a full hour longer, would it have been as effective? They’d have had to pad some and slow it down some, and that could have hurt.

    I like the detailed character analysis, invoking various archetypes:

    Mal is wonderfully convincing. The Knight in Sour Armor is pulled off wonderfully with him, especially as it can be questionable with just how much good really is still in him. Yes, he is a man of honor in a den of thieves, but he nonchalantly killed Dobson and dumped the body simply because he did not have time to deal with it. Not the sign of exactly a moral person that has just given up on ideals.

    Zoe is actually pretty flat in the pilot. She is the stalwart second in command from her first moment on screen and sticks to it the entire time. You get a little depth on her with her interactions with Wash, but those are really far more building for him than her.

    Which brings us to Wash and three words: Witty Comic Relief. When a man’s opening scene is with plastic dinosaurs at a spaceship’s helm, you might think he is there for pure silly, but he manages to throw in enough snark to be witty instead. I also love his husbandly concern, both in pleading with Zoe to stand up to Mal and when he is talking to Simon. Wash is a person, and that is all there is to it, perhaps the most balanced and “normally relatable” on the ship.

    Jayne, on the other hand, is the crass, silly comic relief. Yes he has his dangerous, redneck moments, but, especially in the pilot, he is there to be the dumb, funny, gun-totting hick. He serves as a foil to Mal, and does so faithfully well. I love him later in the series, but here, he is really just a secondary.

    Kaylee. Nuff said. OK, not really, but I will give even more full disclosure and say that if I was a fourteen year old boy, there would be a huge poster of Jewel Staite in my bedroom. Now that we are past the creepy, Kaylee is the female counterpart to Wash on the ship. She is centered and relatable, and she serves as the Earth Mother. She is open and honest and sees through to the real side of people (except for Dobson, I guess, but no one is perfect). And she’s a hot girl who’s a grease monkey. There’s that too.

    Inara, I imagine, is who most boys have on their walls, despite their ages. I will admit, she plays the courtesan-geisha amazingly well, with both her role as ship’s counselor (even the preacher goes to her for benediction) and moral compass. I also enjoyed that, on a network television show, we had a main character who was able to show sexuality as something positive and wholesome, and on Fox at that. Her mild romantic tension with Mal is already well established here, and I am sure the shippers rejoice at something to ship over. I, for one, enjoy the dynamic it adds to both of them.

    Book is very quickly made into a mystery for us. He goes from slightly awkward preacher to ninja in point-three-five seconds flat, and then back to a somewhat unsuspecting preacher. I know that, with the movie, some have speculated that he was once an Operative, but thus far, nothing is solidly canon, so we can only guess. His moral conundrum was delivered quite well, though.

    Simon’s mislead as the villain was actually really good, ’cause it got me the first time I watched this, and I had seen the movie (albeit I couldn’t remember anything beyond River killing everything). His stiffness is well played for the rich kid who doesn’t really know how to be a fugitive, and bumbling Dobson had completely thrown me off too. Later, once Simon starts to open up to the crew, he really does an amazing job of being the protective big brother that gladly and willingly gave up everything for his sister. Still, he never completely shrugs off that dangerous aura about him, and we as the view can just tell there is more to him than meets the eye. After all, he did jump off a catwalk to save River.

    And then there’s River. River is really just a Mac Guffin in this episode. She’s damaged goods, hysterical, and who knows what she’s going to amount to. So for now, Hi River, Bye River.

    Of course these are from the series pilot. It’s amazing just how much each of these characters were fleshed out over the course of the series, despite it being truncated. Of them all, I think Jayne is the one with the most effective character arc, with Zoe coming in second. All the others, you basically have a good sense for who they are from the pilot alone, which is a mark of good storytelling (especially since despite being true to their core, they were never boxed in, like poor Ensign Kim on Voyager). It’s hard to do an ensemble where everyone is introduced, and then everyone is given a chance to shine. Firefly easily achieves this feat in the first episode.

    My favorite scene: the scene of everyone laughing at Simon’s expense. My favorite line: “Well, you’re a dummy.” My favorite visual: the aerial dogfight with the Reaver:

    vlcsnap-10528903.png

    I took some other screenshots from the pilot episode a while back that also really bring back fond memories… what a great show. Sigh.

  • Cowboy BeBop ends

    I just finished watching the final disc of BeBop. Steven said he got “mugged” by the ending (his minireview here). I am frankly, dazed.

    Interestingly, Madeline Ashby at Tor.com is beginning a rewatch of BeBop, which is pretty timely! I have to agree with everything she said about the series as a whole in her first post on the first episode:

    Bebop has what most live-action SF television from English-speaking countries does not: a definite end date, a genuinely compelling story, great production value, interesting speculations on technology and a merciful lack of deus ex machina. It’s a series set in the future, not about the future, and is thus liberated from making any sweeping statements regarding the future. Perhaps for that reason, the world of Cowboy Bebop is neither a sun-dappled utopia nor an unforgiving dystopia. We watch it from the point of view of bounty hunters, so we see the dirty cops and the crime syndicate lowlifes and the mom’s basement-terrorists with delusions of grandeur, but 2071 remains a recognizable iteration of our current world. Ganymede fishing trawlers can be converted to achieve escape velocity, bounties on cross-colony fugitives can be paid from ATM’s, hyperspace toll gates are vulnerable to bugs in proprietary software and need regular firmware upgrades. Its most optimistic prediction is also its most accurate: every colony from Io to Titan is full of signage in Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. There are brown people, black people and pale people with dreds, turbans and mohawks. Watanabe’s future is off-planet, and everybody’s there.

    Given how strongly I loved this series and Champloo, I wonder if there’s a good label for this type of anime genre. What do space cowboys and samurai breakdancers have in common?

    Anyway, my comment on the ending is as follows:

    (more…)

  • Shamus boldly goes

    Cool – Shamus is going to do Star Trek Online after he finishes up with LOTRO. I think his first character looks quite promising:

    I just got WotLK, so I think I will focus on WoW for now. But if theres another MMO I’d jump to, it would be ST:O, so this is great.

  • Galactica news, good and bad

    The great news: another Galactica TV series is in the works. And Caprica renewed for another season. With Caprica and SGU, I’m really set to enjoy a summer of sci-fi (on Syfy).

    The horrible news: They are still serious about a reboot of Galactica as a movie. Helmed by Bryan Singer of the “I had a chance to reboot Superman and made it lame” fame.

  • the battle for the box

    The Set-top Box Wars continue. Amazon is offering $20 in video download credit to anyone buying a Roku XR or Roku HD until March 31; the Popbox is due to be released in a few weeks (here’s a hands-on demo at SXSW); and now Google is getting into the act with hardware built by logitech and running Android and Chrome. Oh and don’t forget Boxee.

    It’s starting to feel like that scene in Moscow on the Hudson where the guy collapses while trying to choose coffee (one of only two scenes I remember from that movie). Just like cell phones, I’m basically paralyzed by (as yet unreleased) choices. I do have my Netflix Wii disc preordered (which was free, admittedly).

    Incidentally, I’m still waiting for a Certain Otaku to review his Popcorn Hour. You know who you are 🙂

  • STS 134 to boldly go

    Check out this awesome crew poster for the upcoming STS-134 mission. First the Firefly theme song, now Star Trek imagery… I think as the Shuttle program closes down, the sentiment about human spaceflight is swelling, and what better way than science fiction to express it?

  • Back to Middle Earth this July

    Filming for The Hobbit (parts 1 and 2, back to back) begins in July!

    On his website, Ian McKellen, who plays the wizard Gandalf, announced that “The Hobbit’s two films start shooting in New Zealand in July. Filming will take over a year. Casting in Los Angeles, New York City and London has started. The script too proceeds. The first draft is crammed with old and new friends, again on a quest in Middle Earth. The director Guillermo del Toro is now living in Wellington, close to the Jacksons’ and the studio in Miramar.”

    In another report from New Zealand, an insider says The Hobbit will be filmed in 3D.

    Remember back in the days they were filming LOTR, when we would obsessively reload TheOneRing.Net? good times. I don’t think I have the same compulsion this time around.

    Worth noting that the “official” movie blog for The Hobbit hasn’t been updated in over 2 years.

    And while we are talking the Hobbitt, it should be noted that Sir Peter Jackson is no longer fit to play a cameo role.

  • comment registration

    One thing I value about this blog is that I still have loyal readers despite my long hiatuses and delays in posting. I can always count at least one or two comments on a post at minimum, and often from people who have never commented before. This is possible because of the open commenting policy here, but that’s also a weakness in that it allows spammers a toehold. The spam filter has been doing its job but lately more and more are sneaking past the defenses, and I am worried that it will get worse form here.

    The question is the usual one facing a blog with a nascent community. Do I limit comments to registered users only, thus slamming the door on the casual readers who will probably never comment again? Or do i leave the door open in the hope that signal stays higher than noise?

    I guess I could also install a plugin to auto-close old comment threads to see if that mitigates the problem. And there are math captcha plugins like I used before. But these are just symptomatic solutions.

    So, lets see what you all have to say about it. What would you prefer? Whats your advice?

  • Star Trek Online – temptation

    UPDATE – the sale is over. Star Trek Online is now priced at $39 (still $10 off retail).

    Excalibur class starship – looks familiar
    It’s bad enough that I got hooked on World of Warcraft. Now I see Amazon is selling the new Star Trek: Online MMO for a ridiculous 45% off – $28instead of $50.

    Man, though, it looks cool. I haven’t seen a decent space combat sim since the X-Wing days. And they are integrating it into the timeline of the original series/movies and the reboot. The Klingons are at war with the Feds again, the Romulans are creeping around, there’s the Borg and even Species 8472. No mention of Section 31, though, unfortunately…