I love Halloween, and all the monsters and ghoulies it brings out. But my favorite aspect of that are the heroes (of either gender) who slay the monsters for us, starting when I was a kid with Riki Tiki Tavi. I was thinking about putting together a best of list, but I didn’t have to, because once more the folks at io9 beat me to it. Ash and Buffy, Dresden and Ripply; what an excellent collection of my favorite people (and near people).
Like everyone else on the planet, I have become a big fan of watching streaming video online. For the most part, as new sources became available, they were connected to a service that had something to gain from the offering, and the ones that didn’t gain anything soon went away. The new one that fits that description is XFinity TV from my cable provider, Comcast. It is a bit of a surprise for two reasons: first, they aren’t asking me for more money for the service, it is just there as part of the package I am already paying for. Second, it has a lot of video my TV set top box doesn’t have, and is missing a lot of the things my cable box delivers. Both of these things make sense once I looked into the reasons for them.
On the first point, I suspect I am not the only person that noticed the economy got a bit rough around the edges over the last few years. Lots of folks have cut back on expenses, and if you are Power or Water you have no worries, because those are live or die items. If you are TV, Telephone, or the Internet, people will actually survive if they don’t pay for you, hard though that may be to believe. Except for that occasional 911 call, of course. So every TV, Telephone, and Internet provider is busy building VARs into their service (Value Added Resources) to make their service too valuable per dollar spent for you to want to give it up. Which makes it obvious why my cable company is giving me a very valuable additional resource without charging me extra for it.
The second point stems from the fact that each network and program production team have their own deals with various distribution outlets. A good example of this is from the Big 4 (or so) Commercial Broadcast Networks; ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox/CW. Both NBC and CBS are on my cable set top box Video On Demand service, with lots of the current programs. ABC is not there, nor is Fox/CW. So I can watch Chuck on NBC or Medium on CBS, but I have no access to No Ordinary Family on ABC, Smallville on CW/UPN or Fringe on Fox/WB. Or was it CW/WB and UPN/Fox? But when I log into XFinity, I have ABC and just watched the Pilot for No Ordinary Family, followed by this past weeks episode of Smallville, and tonight I just may rewatch Fringe. This combination works for me; I can watch everything I am looking for now, each through its assigned delivery system. And the streaming stuff goes with me, anywhere I have Wi-Fi access.
I first played with streaming online video in the mid 1980s, using the Multicast Backbone (MBONE) people were just beginning to develop. It could actually deliver low bandwidth audio in a two way environment at a reasonable rate, so even with a 3600 BAUD dial up modem you could do voice chat with people on another part of the planet. As long, that is, as you were both on one of the internet gateways like Q-Net, Compuserve, or AOL, rather than the much more common BBS systems. Video back then was a postage stamp sized picture at 16 colors refreshing at one frame a second if you had a good connection, and if you are interested in the basics of how it worked in olden days this thread is a good place to start.
It still pretty much works the same way today, except computers are much faster and more powerful, the ones on your desk, in your pockets, inside your TVs and DVD players, and most importantly the ones delivering the internet to you. So my Blue-Ray DVD player has its built in Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora widgets that pipe the output to my TV. On my computer, I have a premium paid account with Crunchyroll to watch Japanese, Chinese, and Korean TV programs an hour after they air in their respective countries, and another one with The Anime Network that gives me access to a completely different set of programming from those same countries. Similar fee-based arrangements are soon to be available in the US from sources such as BBC TV and Sky TV for areas outside the UK, and a whole lot of other programming suppliers from many other countries. In each case, you can watch the programs live (or near live, with a one hour delay being most common), which gives the license holder for that programming two instant advantages:
1) They get a regular payment from X number of online subscribers, without incurring any additional cost beyond building their server farm to handle the additional load. That load is minimal in a Multicast environment, and if you realized they have to pay their program suppliers for the additional people watching their show, you should also have realized they can see how many people are watching which shows based on the number of streams requested for each. So if I log into the BBC service, and only watch Doctor Who and Misfits episodes, all of the money they pass on go to the producers of those shows. That increases the odds that the programs I want to watch will be funded and renewed for another season; I know, because I helped fund them.
2) Both the Network/Service as a whole and those specific programs that pull in the subscription viewers get a spike in their ratings. In a commercial network environment, this means being able to charge more per 30 second spot. But even for non-commercial (in the sense of not running advertisements, NOT in the sense of not making money) networks like HBO or the BBC, ratings are king and are at the heart of increasing revenues.
The Steampunk Fortnight continues over at TOR, with multiple articles stories and presentations posted each day. One I particularly like is the The Amazing Fantastic Steampunk Timeline of Music and Things by Evelyn Kriete. This presents a very nice chronology of the various Steampunk bands, and ties it to some other events and milestones of the subculture, liberally sprinkled with links to most of the mentioned performers and publications.
On the last Wednesday each month, the JICC has an Anime presentation free and open to the public they refer to as their Animezing Series. This month the presentation is Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a watershed animation and a perfect tale for Halloween. Reservations are required for tomorrow night’s event, since the theater has limited seating and there will be only one showing. They invite everyone who is so inclined to wear their best Halloween costumes, but do not bring costume weapons, not even plastic toys. Remember that the Japan Information and Culture Center (JICC) is part of the Embassy of Japan in Washington D.C, and like all embassies their security team is trained to err on the side of caution. I can’t wait to find out what they have in store for us in November, and for this and other events in and around DC be sure to check out their Calendar.
It played a few weeks ago at Sci-Fi London, and now Monsters goes into limited release in the US this Friday. If it doesn’t play anywhere close to you, the web site says it goes into wide release on December 3rd. The buzz from the film fest circuit is positive, and the trailer looks great; I am so there. Also out this week, again in somewhat limited release, is the third film in the brilliant Swedish trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. This movie wraps up the story begun in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and since the second film, The Girl Who Played With Fire comes out on DVD tomorrow, I will be re-watching both of them before hitting the theater for the final chapter.
There are no real genre movies coming out this week, but Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire) brings part two of the trilogy that began with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo home. This Swedish series about an investigative reporter and a girl genius hacker is very much edge of your seat thriller to the core, so much so that even if you have to read subtitles it won’t slow down the movie. The third film, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest, is hitting the theaters on this Friday, October 29th.
For TV, they are finally releasing War of the Worlds: The Final Season, as well as the complete series in one box set, since it only ran two seasons. This was Adrian Paul’s last Sci-Fi TV roll before he became the Highlander. Someone is re-releasing the surviving episodes of Captain Video And His Video Rangers, America’s first Sci-Fi TV show. It ran live on the DuMont Network for half an hour every night from 1949 to 1954. If you don’t remember, Allen B. DuMont invented the cathode ray tube (also called the Picture Tube) in 1932, the Oscillograph (later called the Oscilloscope) in 1933, and Radar in 1934 (the US military asked him not to patent it so they could keep it secret). But he is best known as the inventor of the Television, and his company was selling the TV sets he invented beginning in 1938, with his TV Network going live in 1946.
Bridging the gap between TV and Anime, the American animation series Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Complete Season Two also hits the shelves this week. What I find much more exciting is the fact that Lucasfilm Animation is looking into doing a new animated series with direct creative involvement from Seth Green and Matthew Senreich.
In Anime, Birdy is back with all new adventures in Birdy the Mighty: Decode. Birdy is an interstellar agent with one minor flaw; she is more dangerous to innocent bystanders than the bad guys she pursues, and has been known to take out an entire planet while trying to stop one evildoer. This is part one of the new series, with part two coming out around Thanksgiving. You can watch the first episode online to give you an idea of what the series is like.
In the finest tradition of the Girls with Guns sub-genre, Canaan – Complete Collection takes place after biochemical attacks become common usage, and some assassins have synesthesia, giving them a distinct edge. If you liked Noir, you will love this series. Also in combat mode, Queen’s Blade: The Exiled Virgin – Complete Series takes place in a world where the Queen is chosen by being the last woman standing at the end of a series of battles. All contests are magically transmitted to crystal spheres for the entertainment of the populace. I don’t think either one of these places sounds like somewhere I would want to live, but the shows themselves are fun to watch.
Pandora Hearts part 1 seems to be a twisted variation on Alice in Wonderland meets the Count of Monte Cristo. For his birthday present they put him in a dungeon, with no explanations and no obvious way out. And Fullmetal Alchemist: The Complete Second Season (Viridian Collection) also becomes available, bringing still more world class timeline jumping steampunk into our hands at a more reasonable price.
Also out this week, Naruto Shippuden: Box Set 4 continues the ninja adventure (although there is some evidence it came out last week, since I already saw it on the shelves), while Hetalia: Season Two continues the rather silly story of WWII nations as schoolchildren. This program could actually be used as a teaching tool for that period of history, not because it is particularly accurate, but because it might catch a child’s attention and make them curious. Every teacher I know considers that the most difficult step in the education process, because once they are interested they seek out new knowledge on their own.