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?
Last night we saw Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” at the Belfry Theatre. I was frustrated. On the one hand, Stoppard is an elegant, masterful writer. And the cast was terrific. Jennifer Lines (deserves a Wikipedia entry, so I started one for her) was, as usual, luminous.
However, the play is mercilessly long and talky. I put it at more than two and a half hours. And it’s mostly about the well-worn topic of infidelity. Maybe my attention span is shrinking, but I’d rather watch Patrick Marber’s shorter and fiercer “Closer”, which covers much the same territory in about half the time.
And I was baffled by the staging. The design team seemed to toy with my perceptions–is it 1980 or 2006? Why do two upstage doors provide access to corridors which are already open to the stage? And why is the set so austere? And what was with all that naff music? As the elderly patrons around me sang along to pop tunes from the fifties and sixties, I couldn’t help but feel like the design team was pandering to its aging audience.
I figured that it had to do with the play-within-a-play nature of the script, and that director Michael Shamata was just trying to mess with our heads. Still, I found the staging more irritating than engaging. I also have a general bias against art about art. I’ve read enough writers writing about writing, and seen enough plays about the theatre.
That said, here’s an excerpt from the writers on writing camp that’s too great to pass up. Stoppard is a terrific writer, and this is one of several really beautiful passages in “The Real Thing”. From an old-school Lycos page, Henry is wielding his cricket bat, and comparing good writing to a lousy script he’s just read:
HENRY: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly…[he clucks his tongue to make the noise]. What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might…travel …[He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.] Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you’ll drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. [indicating the cricket bat] This isn’t better because there’s a consipracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better.
I can’t wholeheartedly recommend “The Real Thing”, but if you’ve got patience and a love for great writing, you’ll probably enjoy it.
The Belfry’s publicist, Mark Dusseault, is making great use of some social media channels. They’ve got a fairly active Flickr account, and they post video clips to YouTube. Here’s one from “The Real Thing”:
I’m currently working on the ‘other social media channels’ chapter of our book. There will be a sizable section on Twitter. One small question I’m struggling with is “should organizations follow everybody who follows them?” The safe answer, of course, is ‘yes’. That seems to be the prevailing etiquette (Twittequette?). But it’s not one to which I subscribe.
I’ve mused on this subjectbefore, and I’d rather not muse on it again. It’s the kind of echo-chambery silliness that gets much too much play online. But, in the interests of writing a useful book, here I go again.
Is Mutual Following the Predominant Behaviour?
First off, is mutual or reciprocal following the predominant behaviour? I think so, though I haven’t seen any empirical data or surveys on the subject. I receive an occasional coolly-worded tweet from somebody on Twitter that implies that I should be following them presumably because they’re following me. Lee recently mentioned how that he doesn’t adhere to this policy. His approach seems similar to my own views on the subject:
I take a decidedly lightweight approach to social media. If I haven’t met you or don’t know you personally, I’m not likely to add you as a friend or follow you. I currently follow about 200 people on Twitter and it’s still too much. When I follow someone with the @leelefever account, I try keep up with most of their updates. This is how I’ve always used Twitter.
Giving into this perceived social pressure would force an unwelcome change in how I want to use Twitter, and make it a less useful tool.
The New Blogroll?
Julie pointed out that reciprocal following feels a bit like the new blogroll. A blogroll was a handy way of linking to all of the websites you read. It was also a polite way to recognize that another blog or site had linked to you. They ‘voted’ for your site, and in return you ‘vote’ for theirs using your blogroll.
I’m not sure why (though I expect RSS played a role), but blogrolls seem to be going out of fashion. And the difference between a blogroll and reciprocal following on Twitter is that the former is a passive list on a static page or sidebar, while the latter changes how you use the tool.
In both cases, the behaviour feels kind of punctilious–that I’m doing it primarily for the sake of appearances. The two perspectives feel like, I don’t know, like the socialist versus capitalist view of Twitter. What do you think?
Back in July, I wondered why we didn’t have doulas for the process of dying. Several commenters suggested that hospice and careworkers filled this niche, and I thought thought that explanation made sense.
However, there’s apparently still a market for death doulas or, as I read in today’s Miami Herald, death midwives:
An ordained minister from Sebastopol, Calif., Lyons started a nonprofit organization called Final Passages. She teaches workshops about such topics as how to care for a body while it’s in the family home and about burials outside traditional cemeteries.
Lyons also guides families through the legalities and paperwork of at-home funerals — death certificates and body transport permits — while providing emotional support and counseling. Her services can run from $500 to $1,500.
As a very unscientific litmus test of this idea’s popularity, I’ll note here that since July 29, there have been 65 people that found this site while searching terms relating to doulas and death. I’ll try to check back in another six months or a year, to see if there’s any up-tick in activity.
As I mentioned, we’re off to Panama. Our flight leaves later this afternoon, and it’s a multi-stopover red-eye through the night to Panama City.
We’ll be there until late December. Then we head northward for a few days (and New Year’s) in Manhattan. We’ll be back in Victoria on or about January 3rd.
Posting will thus be light around here for the next month. We (joyfully) won’t have regular web access for at least the next two weeks. We’ll probably visit an Internet cafe or two, though. In the meantime, there’s a couple of other pages on the Intarweb for you to look at. For example, I just discovered Is It Funny Today–kind of a Digg for web comics.
Have a good December, and, you know, be nice to each other.
Frank Rich has been a New York Times columnist for at least five years. Scott Rosenbergrecently twittered about a post by Edward J. Delaney, in which Delaney interviews Rich about a practice that sets Rich apart from nearly all of the other Times columnists: he includes hyperlinks in his work.
Adding links, he says, “came about very informally…I’d say the biggest single breakthrough was to realize, as my assistant Benjamin Toff realized, we have the capability to insert links into the pieces easily, electronically…without going through the bureaucracy. If every link had to go through a bureaucratic procedure that was time-consuming on deadline, we couldn’t do it.
As Scott notes, it’s shocking that, 15 years into the web’s popular existence, we’re still talking about this issue. Rich says that “columnists at The Times are free agents”, and yet hardly any of them link to other stuff. Bizarre, eh?
There’s been plenty of talk lately about how social media creators will fit in with the 2010 Olympics. Dave Olson wrote an open letter to VANOC Media Relations and Press Operations:
In brief, we’d like to have a conversation about how to allow fans and amateur media makers to document their Olympic experience while keeping out of the way of the IOC IP lawyers…
We are aware of your obligations to media rights holders and are seeking to provide an entirely different sort of coverage than the accredited media provide. We are not looking to cover events per se but are instead interested in covering the cultural stories, athletes’ families’ stories, and stories from fans who saved and traveled from around the world for this experience.
This feels like a good place to start. As Dave says, social media types aren’t expecting all-access passes to the gold medal hockey games. He’s right to point out that there’s a big hole to fill in the media coverage for such an event. I was thinking about it, and drew this little Venn diagram:
The CTVs and CBCs are going to have the major, breaking news covered. It’s all that green space–that’s where social media creators can live. Through various channels, I’m seeing several ways forward for benefits for both parties. Social media creators get some tools, resources and access to help with their citizen journalism efforts, and VANOC enjoys a whole new layer of news coverage. Such a partnership would also highlight Vancouver’s place as a global for new media, citizen journalism and the like.
I write this entry mostly because I wanted to include the title “Greenlanders Go To the Polls”. How often do you get to say that? In any case, the 39,000-strong population of Greenland is voting in a referendum on greater independence from Denmark:
If the “yes” side wins, the local Greenland government has the chance to take control of new areas such as natural resource management, justice and police affairs and to a certain extent foreign affairs.
There are potentially lucrative revenues from the natural resources under Greenland’s seabed, which according to international experts is home to large oil deposits. Greenlandic would also be recognised as the island’s official language.
We’ve got a really old Sunbeam mixer. I’m not sure how old–it comes from Julie’s side of the family. But, off the top of my head, it might be nearly as old as I am. I found only one reference (and that’s a slightly different model) to the awesome name it applies to the speed setting: Infinite Speed Governor Control”:
They’re hard to read in the photo, but each of the 12 speeds has an accompanying term associated with it. As a former technical writer, I’m troubled by the willy-nilly use of both gerunds (”mixing”, “folding”) and specific foods (”quick breads”, “puddings”) in the list. Do they still do this on new mixers and blenders? As you might imagine, I’m not much for the baking.
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.
