You know, through three and half seasons I’ve found Battlestar Galactica to be a strong show. It’s got a very watchable visual style, decent acting for a sci-fi series and, until recently, a really engaging plot. I especially liked how creator Ronald Moore skillfully wove contemporary themes through the show. It’s something that science fiction often does, but Moore and his writing team managed it without being overly preachy. I’d recommend the show to nearly anybody.
There’s seven or eight episodes in the show’s fourth and final season–there was a quizzical six month hiatus between the first and second halves of this season.
Something seems to have gone deeply wrong in-between.
I was underwhelmed by last week’s episode, and tonight’s was really no better. The show just seems to be recycling scenes and plot points from early seasons. How often have we seen (minor spoilers from tonight’s episode ahead) these scenes before?
Starbuck jawing with fellow officers in the pilot’s room.
Admiral Adama and President Roslin having mopey conversations about her mortality.
Tom Zarek fomenting dissent among the fleet.
Ships rebelling against Admiral Adama’s ham-fisted martial decrees.
Admiral Adama approving the use of deadly force against his fellow humans.
A lot of pitched drama about babies.
And the show seems to have abandoned any of its perspective on or critiques of our world. The last two episodes just seen like talky soap operas in space.
Maybe the extra few months away from the show flipped some ambivalence bit in my head, but I find myself totally unimpressed with BSG‘s latest efforts. Anybody else?
On Monday I was supposed to fly to Vancouver on a Harbour Air seaplane, but was foiled by all the fog. Even the ferry was running a half-hour late. And, to add insult to injury, on Tuesday we were stuck at the ferry terminal for two hours because one of the, uh, super ferries had a mechanical problem. Sabotage, perhaps, by a laid-off worker?
All of this is just a whiny introduction to this gorgeous photo that Derek mentioned. It’s from Buzz’s photostream on Flickr, but apparently some guy named Blair (Kent) shot it while up on Cypress on Sunday. Click to view a larger version with 47% more fogginess.
UPDATE: As per Buzz and Derek’s posts and the comments below, this photo belongs to one Blair Kent.
Before Christmas, while working on the Save the Great Bear campaign, I had an idea for a Twitter-powered site that could, if successful, be an effective engine for spreading news and calls to action for social change causes. I talked with sundry people about it, including Rochelle and Geoff (they made Twemes), Joe, Boris, James and so forth. Everybody seemed to think it was a good idea. So I submitted it to this contest on Changemakers.net (please consider rating my idea on the site–no registration required). Even if nothing comes of that (and the odds are against me), I’m hoping to build it.
That’s it in a nutshell. After the jump I’ll excerpt some text from my Changemakers.net submission, which explains and expands in text what the video summarizes. Just to clarify, there’s nothing at 10000Tweets.com–the thing hasn’t been built yet.
Somebody from the National Film Board of Canada emailed to tell me they’d launched a new version of their site at NFB.ca. At first glance, it looks like a nice, clean redesign, with the emphasis on the films, where it should be. The ‘featured film’ this week is an hour-long piece called “Carts of Darkness”, which tells the story of some Vancouver homeless guys who get their thrills by racing shopping carts. You can watch the whole thing on the NFB’s site.
Or, because the NFB was clever, I can embed it in my site, just like YouTube:
I quite like the slick, icon-free way they implemented the ‘Share this film’ feature.
Not all of the implementation is quite that slick. I searched for a favourite wacky film from my childhood, “Paddle to the Sea”, and the clip on offer is served up in the dreaded RealPlayer.
It’s understandable that their archives would be a bit of a format nightmare, though. This looks, after a quick look around, like a wise evolution of the NFB’s web presence.
First, a heartfelt thank-you to all of the Northern Voice sponsors, from this year and the past four. Without you, the average conference ticket would be at least twice what it is today.
The conference needs just one more sponsor. From our esteemed sponsor wrangler:
We’re looking for our last NV headline sponsor to sponsor the NV party at the $3000 level. We are planning an upscale dinner party on the Thursday night (more details to be announced soon) and are looking for a sponsor to be the headline sponsor for this event. Your sponsorship would go towards subsidizing the cost of dinner tickets, so that it’s affordable for attendees. This party is always well attended and we’re sure it will sell out, just as the conference has.
Times are tough, but here’s a way for an organization to be a shining star in the country’s biggestsecond-biggestthird-biggest (I just checked, and Mathewtold me that Mesh had 450 people last year) social media conference.
We took two cameras to Panama last month–our workhorse Nikon D70 and Julie’s old-school Pentax K1000. We shot four or five rolls of film with the Pentax, and (after soliciting advice from you, my dear readers), I finally got around to getting it developed at the local Lens & Shutter (click-click, click-click).
The battery on the light meter on the Pentax was depleted, so for the first couple of rolls we had to just eye ball things. Compound this with the fact that some of the film was expired (we knew this, and embraced any wacky results), and our efforts were a bit spotty. Here are a few–I won’t say favourites. Here are a few that were not deleted with more certainty than the others:
Last Saturday night we saw alternative country singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards at the Alix Goolden Hall (needs a Wikipedia page) here in Victoria. It was an all-around excellent concert experience. Edwards is a great songwriter blessed with a distinctive voice. I read one critic recently who described her as a “persuasive live performer”. That’s very apt–she demands that you listen to her.
She has three albums of really strong material, and any fan would have gone home happy with her well-chosen set list. In fact, the only song that I could name (without consulting my MP3 collection) that she didn’t play was “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like”. For the encore, she played a delightful version of “Mercury”, and then she and her husband-bandmate stepped in front of the mics to play a lovely, quiet version of the Everly Brothers “When Will I Be Loved”. Finally, they finished with a terrific, tumbling cover of Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”. It’s a confident singer who ends her show with two covers.
It was, all in all, an excellent concert going experience, enriched by my first visit to the Alix Goolden Hall. It’s a converted 800-seat, 19th century church, and now belongs to the Victoria Conservatory of Music. I tried to determine what denomination the church had been, but couldn’t find anything on the web. It’s quite an austere space, with white walls, a sloped, curving balcony and ornate stained glass windows, so we guessed Greek Orthodox. It also had lovely acoustics–aside from the Chan Centre, probably the best my in-expert ears have heard on the West Coast.
Edwards’ opening act made me feel old. It was Dustin Bentall. Yes, that’s Barney Bentall’s son. Barney Bentall, for the unintroduced, was kind of a regionally-famous singer in the eighties and nineties. He played with a band called “The Legendary Hearts”, and they had hits like “Something To Live For”.
So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.
Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction.
This is the standard corporate line:
We had no idea this was going on.
It was the act of a single (often ‘low-level’) employee (the Lone Gunmen Theory of Corporate Deflection).
It is, in no way, a reflection of our organization.
The letter itself is pretty goofy. First, why say “may have posted”? If there was any ambiguity, the company’s president wouldn’t be writing a letter on Sunday afternoon. Additionally, the guy worked for Belkin. So to say that “Belkin does not participate in…unethical practices” is inaccurate. If a Belkin employee promotes Belkin unethically, in the course of his work day, with Belkin’s money, then there’s no question that Belkin does participate in those practices. And “great surprise and dismay” is protesting a bit too much, isn’t it?
In the so-called age of conversation, surely we’re all tired of companies acting unethically, and then deploying waffling, corporate language to deflect or evade blame.
You know, through three and half seasons I’ve found Battlestar Galactica to be a strong show. It’s got a very watchable visual style, decent acting for a sci-fi series and, until recently, a really engaging plot. I especially liked how creator Ronald Moore skillfully wove contemporary themes through the show. It’s something that science fiction often does, but Moore and his writing team managed it without being overly preachy. I’d recommend the show to nearly anybody.
