A Few Minor Bugs

Josh is ever the early adopter. He’s the perpetual volunteer technology guinea pig, especially where iDevices and Apple operating systems are concerned. Most times the only consequences he has to endure for his enthusiasm are a couple of “restores from backup” or maybe a total factory reset. Other times he ends up with no skin. Still, I bet he enjoyed that new panorama feature in iOS 6 at least once or twice before he was flayed.

Upgrade to iOS 6 Right Now

WIL WHEATON PLUSHIE UPDATE!

If you ordered the Lil’ Wil plushie, the order page has been updated with an estimated delivery date (to us) of November. Once they’re in hand, they’ll start shipping from Blind Ferret out to you.

Speaking of Blind Ferret and Wil Wheaton, they’re all at Montreal Comiccon this weekend.

You can find my shirts and books at the Blind Ferret Booth (506 and 508). If sales are good when I’m not even there, I might try to come to the show next year. Canada is always incredibly expensive to get to (from Texas) and to stay in, but it’s also always a blast.

COMMENTERS: Are you a firmware hacker, a jailbreaker a boot loader or a rom flasher? Or are you a skittish software installer like me who waits for the OS cookies to be fully baked and cooled before biting into them? Any particular triumphs or horror stories? Back in the days of dumb phones when dumb phones were JUST starting to get smarter I had a Symbian OS Nokia. It was the first phone I’d ever even held that you could install apps on. I think they were all java apps that random dudes coded in their basements and uploaded to usenet, but they were MORE than what I paid for which was neat. The phone also shared the same internals as the Nokia N-gage (Taco Talkin’ Time!), so I was able to load 1 or 2 N-gage games at a time onto the flash card. Games that were impossible to play without a proper D-pad. Still, it was pretty neat.

Scalzi Comic Dare: All My Sweet Pitches

HijiNKS ENSUE PODCAST Episode 87 “ZombieWhatever.com” is live!

Alternate Title: Pitch Slapped
Alternate Alternate Title: Pitch Slapped 2: Pitch Better Have My Money

In the past, only Wil Wheaton has been deemed worthy to wield the power of THE COMIC DARE. This week, however, another was found who possessed the strength of will and the Strength Of Wil (TM) required to harness The Comic Dare’s awesome might and use it for its most righteous purpose: SAYING DUMB STUFF ON TWITTER THEN FORCING ME TO DRAW IT! That person, the Beta Ray Bill to Wheaton’s mighty Thor is noted sci-fi author, Internet opinions haver, and celebrated balding ukester JOHN SCALZI (hold for applause).

Scalzi occasionally finds himself in the precarious position of being asked by TV executives how to put things on our watching boxes that are not overwhelming terrible, reprehensible and offensive. So far they don’t seem to be taking his advice to heart. He had just one such meeting earlier this week at which he pitched original ideas for shows, and clarified via INTERNET SHOUTING that said shows would not involve “goats, vampires or sleuths with mental issues.” As we all know, these are the three cornerstones of modern televised shenanigans. Well, the last two are. The goats… must be an Ohio thing. Subsequently he issued the challenge to bring Sherlock: Vampire Goat to life and I, obliged by my 1000 year curse… uh, obliged.

TV is at an all-time weirdness juncture. It is currently producing fictional dramas and comedies that will certainly go down in history as “the best things humanity was able to accomplish before The Fire Ocean cleansed the Earth of all Mankind” (Breaking Bad, Sherlock, Game Of Thrones, Community). But it is also falling prey to a dangerous trend in which networks do not simply steal genre ideas from each other (“You got a cop show, a medical show and a medical cop show? We got those too! Suck it!”), but they now steal ENTIRE SHOWS from each other and put them on the air AT THE SAME TIME. Sherlock is a modernized version of A.C.D.’s Holmes and it is essentially perfect. CBS saw that show and thought, “Yeah! Let’s do exactly that right now while they’re still doing it try to stop us you can’t HAHAHAHAH!” And now we will soon have Elementary. House M.D. (which was also based on Holmes… so in addition to the remaking current shows epidemic, we also have the “Every show is about Sherlock Holmes” epidemic) was off the air for many 15 minutes before another 3 or 4 “I’m kind of crazy, but also brilliant, but it’s my craziness that lets me see the world in a particular way and catch things others miss and it also makes relationships hard and it also makes me seem like a jerk because I am” shows got the green light. Perception is the only one that comes to mind immediately, but I am almost certain and totally unwilling to further research that there are more. LOTS more. Is Numb3rs still on TV?

At least every network tried their hand at the “fairytales are totally real” genre this year. Vampires? Forget about it. The CW just started making “Twilight: The Horrible Show on TV instead of the HORRIBLE movies in the theater” before Edward even married that werewolf frankenstein or whatever happens in those things. I know that doesn’t fit the premise I’m trying to establish because I don’t think there are any other vampire romance shows besides The Vampire Diaries… oh wait, Trueblood. There you go. I’m still right.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that televised fiction is currently straddling the finest of lines between its crowning achievement and it’s most uninspired dreck. There’s lots of middle ground, but most of it is so unremarkable it isn’t worth mentioning. By not being quite as bad and the worst stuff on the air, it becomes wholly forgettable. Save us, Scalzi! Save us from the Hollywood Industrial Machine that you are now apparently a part of! Oh, and call me about SH:VG. I’ve got some ideas for Moriarty.

COMMENTERS: Feel free to pitch your own “Current TV Trend Mashup” show idea.

UPDATE: Scalzi speaks.

Predator Vs. Aliens

HijiNKS ENSUE PODCAST Episode 87 “ZombieWhatever.com” is live!

COMMENTERS: Did you like the first two episodes of this season of Doctor Who? PLEASE NO SPOILERS IF YOU KNOW THE ACTUAL ANSWER TO THE NEXT QUESTION!!! How do you suppose they are going to work Oswin into being the new companion, seeing as how the same access plays them both? The companion’s name is Clara Oswin, so do you suppose she is a relative of Oswin’s? AGAIN NO ACTUAL SPOILERS, but how do would you like Rory and Amy to depart vs. how do you think they’re actually going to depart? I bet Amy gets turned into a Weeping Angel and Rory gets crushed between two stray planets.

Also, feel free to make up your own Dalek Parent and Dalek Child dialog. “YOU MUST EXTERMINATE YOUR VEGETABLES BEFORE YOU HAVE ANY SWEETS! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!”

Putting Out Fires

HijiNKS ENSUE PODCAST Episode 87 “ZombieWhatever.com” is live!

I can’t say I’m totally in favor of tech that’s involuntarily ad supported. Maybe if it was an option for a lower upfront cost I’d be cool with it, but knowing that it’s just part of the package is a little hard to swallow. Of course Google (the actual search engine, not the media conglomerate that beams keywords into your nightmares based on specific childhood fears you wrote about on Facebook) is a piece of tech that only comes plastered with ads. So maybe that’s not such a bad way to keep costs done. Ok, in the course of two sentences I have invalidated my own opinion, or at least confused it a bit.

I remember in the late 90’s/early 2000’s when you could get free dial up if you agreed to have about 2″ of your 15″ (14″ viewable) monitor taken up with ads. I never got it to work at my apartment, but I had a few friends that did and they would make a bezel out of black tape around their screens to permanently cover the ads. Perhaps that was the first ad blocker. Speaking of ad blockers, if you use one please consider white-listing this site. I make a about a quarter of my income from ads and every little bit helps.

Despite being an iPad man myself, I am glad that there are more and more quality tablets hitting the market and taking a foothold. When I was a kid I always liked the “futuristic” shows that would depict the magical world of the year 2001 where everyone had a personal communication device about the size of a text book with them. I even made a cardboard and paper model of Penny’s Computer-Book from Inspector Gadget. Now there are at least 4 items in my house that could be described as computer books. I’m not saying a tablet in every hand drastically improves the world or the average person’s quality of life (though an argument could be made if we got down to specifics), but it does make everything feel more futurey and that is fine by me.

I feel like having a smartphone with relatively fast internet essentially makes you a cyborg. No joke. It gives you nearly instant access to essentially all human knowledge and effectively increases your memory and brainpower to superhuman levels. Sure you can’t tell me how far away the North Pole is off the top of your head, but you can find the information in less than 30 seconds. Effectively, isn’t that the same thing? What if your phone didn’t have a screen, but instead had a neural output that fed the information you requested directly into your brain? Would there be any difference in knowing the names of everyone that signed the Declaration of Independence or being able to recall and recite the information immediately? I already look at my brain’s relationship to my computer/phone/tablet/cloud storage as a relationship between two different computers. Instead of taxing my brain to remember the several hundred things on about a dozen differently prioritized to do lists (do now, do later, long term, website stuff, freelance stuff, etc.), I only have to remember to check the list. I have replaced hundreds of processes, commands, and chunks of memory with a single command and a single bit of data. You could do the same thing with a piece of paper, but that wouldn’t be nearly as fun.

I guess I didn’t talk about those new Kindle Fires much, huh? Well, it seemed like there were a lot of them. At least four. Maybe two hundred.

COMMENTERS: Please weigh in on ad-supported tech or the new Kindle Fires in general. Or share any stories about how far you have gone to defeat some measure intended to cripple a service you were using in some way. Any black tape on the monitor? Ever record early streaming internet radio to tape the edit out the commercials? If you are a weirdo like me, desperately clawing his or her way into a perceived “future,” please share your thoughts on “my phone makes me a brain robot.”

Sherlocked And Loaded

My wife and I shotgunned Sherlock series 1 and 2 in three days. It wouldn’t have taken THAT long if she hadn’t insisted on feeding, caring for and paying attention to our child. A child who can almost open a the Pop-Tarts box by herself which essentially makes her self sufficient. When we finished the series I felt that strange mix of relief and anticipation that comes with totally immersing yourself in a particular fiction for days at a time. You’re satisfied to have completed your goal, but anxious for there to be more of it. More to consume. When something is THAT good, waiting months for new installments is like… well, it’s almost like a REAL problem. Which it is not. Still… HURRY UP AND GET ME BACK TO 221B BAKER STREET! There’s mysteries what need solvin’!

I feel like Sherlock’s immensely impressive powers of deduction would be wasted on someone like me who rarely leaves the house other than to run simple errands or go to the airport, and who posts nearly every detail of his goings on to the Internet. He’d step foot in my dwelling (presumably where I had either just been murdered or been accused of such), rapidly flash across the items lying about – my suitcase (still packed from my last convention), my office (the room where I keep my piles of things), the couch with a big my-ass-shaped divot in it and me with my makes-British-look-Jamaican skin tone) – mumble, “Booorrrring,” under his breath and let D.I. Lestrade take it from there. Then he’d go convince Watson to let him shoot a cadaver off his head with a canon and torment his brother ~~Minecraft~~ Mycroft until an interesting case presented itself.

I had a friend in my early 20’s that reminds me of Sherlock. He was smarter than EVERYONE in the room and was exceedingly frustrated with how much less intelligent everyone was than him. Of course this just made him seem arrogant and callous, when in fact he was just struggling to figure out how to relate to regular dumb people. He was the kind of guy that would give away all of his possessions then not have money for rent, or sell his car to pay for school, then skip all of his classes to read books about obscure, unused programming languages and small mammals. He was also one of my favorite people in the world. He even looked quite a bit like Cumberbatch. The only point to share all of that with you is to convey that one of the reasons I fell in love with the show Sherlock mere minutes after starting it (regardless of it’s incredible cast, superb writing, and sublime character development) was that I felt like I knew this guy and instantly understood what made him tick. I wondered if Moffatt had a friend like mine who inspired Sherlock or if he was just a culmination of his understanding of the human condition.

COMMENTERS: Feel free to share your thoughts on Sherlock. Did you ever know anyone like Sherlock who simply can’t relate to regular, stupid humans? Are you going to watch the US Sherlock show, Elementary, with Lucy Liu and the guy from Hackers? Well, don’t. It’s going to be terrible. What series did you watch via dvd, streaming or other bulk means that you simply couldn’t stop watching? “Just one more episode…”