When I was ten years old in 1984, I got a new board game called Mystery Mansion. The night I got it, I played around with it in my bedroom while the rest of my family watched a mega-hyped miniseries that was making its debut that night. Never being the type to enjoy getting into something mid-stream, I never watched the original V, despite seemingly everyone talking about it. I picked up enough details (OMG they're lizard people!) to maintain a working knowledge of the series but always felt like I'd missed out on a cultural phenomenon.

So it was with some fair anticipation that I awaited the current remake of the series. My "V"erdict after watching the first two episodes? I didn't have to wait 25 years -- I've already seen this show. Let's see, there's...

* Nice-seeming aliens who turn out to be evil (every other episode of Star Trek: Enterprise -- and not the good ones)...

* ...who can look just like humans (Battlestar Galactica)...

* ...and a plucky group of heroes who will eventually get together to fight the evil but in the meantime, you'll just have to follow along all their separate stories and hope that the payoff will be worth it (Heroes).

I don't know if I'll give the third episode a try.

Current Mood: underwhelmed

Morning John,

This may seem a little out of the blue however I wanted to see if you could help me!?

I'm currently working closely with the BBC in helping with their IT needs and have just found out that the lovely lady in HR that I usually speak with is finishing her contract next Friday.

Joanna is a competent, friendly and professional HR Specialist and it seems a shame to see her out of work.

Is there any room in the HR team at Beckman Coulter UK Ltd for Joanna?

Regards, Graham

So I'm still watching Dollhouse. And I'll keep watching it until the end of the season or until it's canceled -- whoops, same thing. But it's really starting to annoy me, on two fundamental levels. (Yes, there are spoilers ahead if you haven't watched all of Season 2 yet.)

1) It's starting to look like Star Trek: The Original Series, and not in a good way. A major complaint about the old show was that nearly every week there was some kind of equipment failure, brought on by the fact that they made technology so good and so advanced that there needed to be some kind of malfunction to create drama. Transporters don't work, so the crew has to walk or take a shuttle. Sensor glitch, so we don't know what that anomaly is made of. Intense magnetic fields are messing with the tricorder, so we can't get a reading on that alien sneaking up on us. Nice for drama, but if equipment is failing on a regular basis, why does the crew keep entrusting their lives to it?

Now, every other episode of Dollhouse seems to present some glitch in the system that typically results in an active doing something crazy. They've even started exploiting these glitches (as Ballard did with Echo in episode 1 of this season), but it's running up against the same issues that Trek has. As far as I can tell, there's about a 50% chance of something going horribly wrong with an active (Echo especially) during an engagement. You think that it's improbable that the Dollhouse (all 20 of them) can remain secret? I think it's even more improbable that their failure rate can remain enough of a secret that they can keep attracting new clients.

Plus, you're re-writing people's brains! How could you not think this was going to go horribly wrong? Which leads to...

2) I don't know what the rules are any more. At first, it was simple: An active's mind is wiped, they get a treatment, new personality until they're wiped again and the cycle starts all over.

But they've messed around with this concept so much that I don't know what an active should remember and what he/she shouldn't. Echo was already having "flashbacks" in season one and this new thing about her implanted memory or whatnot brought up in episode 2 just muddles things even further. Is she wiped? Is she implanted? Where are these other memories coming from? It would have been OK to have one character who "broke the rules" in a semi-predictable sense (and I think Alpha fit that role perfectly), but now I can't tell from scene to scene if Echo is wiped or has some lingering memory. And I think Victor still wants to nail Siena.

I'll keep watching, because In Joss I Trust, but if the show gets canceled at the end of the season, I won't be as up in arms as I was for Angel or Firefly.

Current Mood: aggravated

I didn't make the video, but I'm the captain in the goofy pirate hat.

Current Mood: geeky

I wasn't going to blog about this, but after reading Chuck's latest post about bad writing, I decided to pass on the worst-edited line I've ever read in a professional novel.

Two years ago, I picked, pretty much at random from the bookshelf of the fantasy section Lynn Flewelling's Luck in the Shadows, a fantasy novel centering around a "noble thief" character (who, if Brian Kallenbach is reading this, could have served as inspiration for his character in our GURPS game) and his new apprentice. The writing is slow and deliberate and overwrought with description, but at least the characters are interesting.

In the latter half of the book, though, I've been picking out more and more editing errors. A missing quotation mark here, a misspelling there -- bad, but not egregiously so. Being an editor, I understand that, when you're proofing 150,000 words or so, some things are going to slip through.

Then, near the end of the book, I read this jaw-droppingly horrific sentence, reprinted exactly as it appears in the book:

Sulfur oil, I think" said Myhini.

Hoo boy! Let's see, there's:

1) No quotation marks at the start of the sentence;
2) No comma at the end of the quote, after "think";
3) And the character's name is "Myrhini." With an "r."

Three errors in a six-word sentence. That's got to be a record.

Current Mood: indescribable

If you think about it, wagering that extra dollar in Final Jeopardy is really a dick move.

Suppose I go into FJ leading with $15,000 and you're in second place with $12,000. Pretty much every contestant in my situation would wager $9,001, so that, if the second-place player doubles his money to $24,000, I'll still win with $24,001.

But on the show, if there's a tie, both players get the money and they both get to come back the next day. All I'm doing by wagering that extra dollar is gaining a dollar while depriving you of $24,000.

What I should do is this: I should tell you, "Hey, I'll wager $9,000 instead of $9,001 if you'll give me, say, 25% of your winnings today." Assuming we both answer the question right, it's a good deal for me -- I give up $1 to gain $6,000 -- and it's a good deal for you because you'll gain $18,000 instead of $0.

Unfortunately, I think Alex might have something to say about it.

Current Mood: devious

Thanks to whoever it was that pointed me to Warren's new site in a comment to this post a few days ago. (I'm guessing it was Kathy, who always forgets to sign her anonymous comments.) I read pretty much everything on the site and it led to this article on ICv2. Milton says the Decipher stories have been "getting good clicks," because "everybody loves a train wreck."

Make sure especially to watch this (melodramatic) video by a VA Beach news station. Chuck, Tom, are those your desks at 1:37? And I remember those photo shoots!

And I just found a follow-up video made after the sentencing here. WARNING: Tragic misspelling alert at 1:30!

I recently re-read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was the first time I'd read all three books in full since 1997, while I was playing Iron Crown's CCG but before the movies came out. The last time I'd read them before that was around 1993, before the CCG.

On this readthrough, I imagined everything through the eyes of Peter Jackson's movies. Aragorn's lines were delivered by Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin was Sam, and Minas Tirith was big and white. In my 1997 readthrough, I have a vague notion of thinking of the art from the CCG and applying its visuals to my mind's eye as I read. I have no idea how I envisioned the characters in 1993, beyond the most basic of characteristics (Gandalf as the prototypical old wizard, the Nazgul as really scary, etc.).

I have a certain idea of how people, places, and things in George RR Martin's Ice and Fire series look. I'd say the art on the covers of the books has influenced me more than, say, Fantasy Flight's CCG and board game, though not to the extent of them supplanting my initial visual concepts of the characters when I first read A Game of Thrones in 2000. I knew that HBO was planning on a series based on the books, in the fashion of Rome, and while I'll be happy to see it, I'm a little sad that, by the time it's over, I'll have forgotten how I initially viewed the characters and know that my concept of them will be forever linked to the actors who play them, many of whom you can read about here.

Poor Sean Bean. He's always destined to be knocked off early in epic fantasy works, isn't he? Now if only they could get The Big Show (this wrestling generation's Andre the Giant) to play Gregor Clegaine.

Current Mood: nostalgic

In another case of how blogging can get you noticed, this post attempts to figure out how long Bill Murray spent trapped in Groundhog Day.

And then Harold Ramis weighs in.

Current Mood: nerdy

Complaining in it might actually work.

Read this post, and then note the third comment. Amazing!

Current Mood: impressed