TL;DR IndieTV

0^th, The Fine Brothers. (Mostly about the flak YouTube earners got [due to jealousy], but also this:) How many people truly want to watch short form television style content inside the web? We’ll tell you how many. TONS. Hundreds of thousands, millions, but you know why they don’t watch your show? Because you have not built a connection to them, because you haven’t built a personal brand and experience for them to climb aboard and want to support, because you don’t have a real reason for the show to be distributed online beyond just “making something”, and surprisingly a lot of the time because you haven’t created a very good show not just for the web, but for any platform.

1^st, Barrett Garese. Stop making short-TV or short-films and putting it online and calling it "online entertainment". It's derivative, and TV does it better already.

2^nd, Barret's followup. We’re going to start having to think of the medium first, and the story second.

3^rd, David Nett. Where Barrett is wrong, in my opinion, is in the underlying assumption in his tip: that we want to be pioneers in online entertainment. Rather than whipping ourselves into a frenzy over Barrett’s perfectly sound advice, I believe a creator should ask him or herself plainly, “what am I trying to make? Am I trying to make a TV show, and the web is the best current distribution option for my show?” If the answer is yes, then in my opinion Barrett’s advice simply doesn’t apply.

4^th, Marc Hustvedt. There’s a flawed point of logic in the argument that web video should always be something different than what’s on TV or film.

Finally, New Mediacracy (via) which lead me to the others. Barrett Garese, Brett Register, Craig Frank, Jamie Blair, along with NM regulars Chris McCaleb, Zadi Diaz, and Steve Woolf get together. Conversation really needed David and Marc, but what do you want? Your money back?

Video Games Can Be Art

So, recently, Roger Ebert (whom, to be clear, I adore) once again declared that video games are not art, and CAN NEVER BE!

Which is absurd. Of COURSE games can be art. Everything about Shadow of the Colossus is art, not just the fantastic visuals, not just the story, but even down to the controller itself! But it's clear that Ebert has never played SotC. (This, despite it being mentioned several times in reader responses the first time he brought this up). His initial argument is "Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control." But, games like SotC has its plot on rails; the player has "choices" but really, the player has to move the plot forward. If the player goes off exploring, the game pretty much just waits. Ebert just appears to be completely unfamiliar with the wide range of games and gametypes available (he also appears to believe that ALL games have winners and losers, which has never been true).

He also never played Braid, although he knows enough about it to discounts its possibility as art. Well, I say he knows about it, but clearly his opinion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the premise. Ebert's entire article was prompted by Kellee Santiago's TED talk (which you can see here). Here is a quote from his piece:

Her next example is a game named "Braid". This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Braid doesn't allow you to go back in time and correct your mistakes, it FORCES you to go back in time and correct your mistakes. That's a fundamental part of the game mechanic, arguably the entire POINT of the game. It's not 'taking back a move' and negating the discipline of the game, it IS the game! And his remark about 'wordy fortune cookies' is another indicator that he never played it. Yes, you are given tiny snippets of a story, but the larger story becomes clear as you play. If he HAD played Braid, he would understand that.

So let's talk about Chess (which he also mentioned). Santiago says that Chess isn't art, and can't be art, because it's just a set of rules. No matter how elegant the set of rules, it's not art. Fine. I'm not going to argue that point. So, let's try this thought experiment:

Imagine there is a PLAY about Chess. The actors dress up like the pieces, you can have fights between the white pawn and the red knight, eventually one king is killed and the play is over. You don't see the chessboard itself, the play is just using a Chess theme.

Can that be art? Of course. A play can be art, even if its theme comes from a game.

So, now imagine that towards the end of the play, the white king can send his knight or his queen to fight the red bishop. OK? Both parts are scripted, but it's up to the audience to shout out their preference for that performance. The play has two different endings, depending on the outcome. Everything else about the play is the same.

Can that still be art? I think so. The presence of a choice by the audience does not negate everything else in the play. The audience's choice isn't the art, it's still the writing/acting/etc.

So, now imagine that the audience has a choice twice during the play. Or three times. Or twenty. Everything else is still true, there are scripted scenes for the players to act out. Eventually, the audience could have enough choices to play an entire game of Chess.

Is that still art? Again, I think so. There doesn't come a point where the fact that the audience has choices negates the art in the rest of the play, because the art is NOT about their choices! The art is always about the play, and what is shown to the audience.

It is the same with video games. The art isn't about the player's choices, it's about everything else.

As the Penny Arcade guys said, Ebert's simply a man determined to be on the wrong side of history. And that makes me sad.

Production Values

Good morning, world! I love getting up before the sun, especially that part where I can stalk around my apartment like a cat, seeing everything so clearly in just the ambient light. What I don't like is the fact that I live in Cheney and absolutely no stores are open right now. So I'm going to pass some time on the computer.

First up, how do I UNSEE something? Somewhere along the line, I became aware of fake-consumption in TV shows. People "drink" from empty cups and "eat" with nothing in their mouth. I was reminded of this last night while watching LOST, when Sawyer "ate" an apple, but really it's epidemic. I watch a lot of police-procedurals, where they "drink" a lot of coffee, and it's always so SO obvious! They should start filling those empty cups with water at least, so the actors remember they can't be tossing them around.

The WORST offender was probably White Collar, another police-procedural (and one of my favorite variations, the cop+civilian team [see also: Castle, The Mentalist, Bones, Lie To Me]). There was an episode of White Collar where it was an actual plot point whether or not a glass of wine was poisoned/drugged. So the woman took a "sip". Now, this is with a crystal-clear glass, and we can all SEE that she didn't drink anything! ARGH!

Of course, this is the same show with the set-design so poor that when they close the doors in the office, the entire wall swings precariously (very visible in the first episode). Their solution? For the rest of the season, they never closed the door. And when a scene called for the door to be closed, they would foley a door-closed sound with the door a few inches open. Which we could see. There was even a shot THROUGH the gap at a character outside the office. It's like, it's like the whole THING was a joke! Arglebargle!

Anyway, my point was, good morning.

Bullets and Blunders

Caught up on a bit of telly this evening, including the latest QI and Psych.

On QI, there was the old canard about if you fired a bullet and dropped it simultaneously, which would hit the ground first?  The standard answer is, they would hit at the same time.

Except, that's not strictly true.  They would essentially hit at the same time, but not precisely.  The fired bullet would hit ever so slightly after the dropped bullet.  Stephen even admitted that if the bullet were going FAST enough, it would leave the atmosphere.  So, at one speed does it go from hitting the ground at exactly the same time as a dropped bullet, and NEVER hitting the ground?  It only takes a moment's thought to work out that it must land slightly later.  The greater the speed, the greater the delay, until it reaches a velocity that takes it out of the atmosphere.  BUT, since a bullet's speed is never going to be THAT great, the delay is hardly measurable.  It's like how a spring weighs slightly more compressed than uncompressed; the difference is so small it is hard to quantify.  But it's there.

The bullet blunder on Psych was much more egregious, although technically it was a tree transgression.  In this episode, they found a bullet embedded high in a tree.  It got that high due to the tree's growth over the years.  However, trees do not grow in this manner.  Despite the widely held belief to the contrary, trees actually grow from the top.  All parts of a tree (branches, embedded evidence, etc) will stay pretty much at the same height, no matter how much time passes.

I watched these two shows back-to-back.  I'm beginning to wonder if too much education lessens the enjoyment I would otherwise get from television.

Radio Lab

"I've got a story to tell you. It's a good one, too. Imagine, 1962, rural village of Kashasha, Tanzania. Girl's boarding school. Girl is sitting in class.

She begins to laugh.

The girl next to her, maybe to her left, hears her laugh and she begins to laugh.

Across the classroom a third girl joins in, the teacher gets upset, but it's too late. Soon four girls, and eight -- the entire class has begun to laugh, and then cry, and then laugh, and then cry..."

"At what?"

"Just 'cause, I don't know. Anyhow, a girl outside at that moment walking down the hall, imagine she hears the laughter from the classroom. She starts to laugh, and as she walks and laughs her laughter goes into other classrooms, and soon the whole school is doing this: laughing, crying, laughing, crying... Teachers cannot control these girls; when they try to, the girls get violent!"

"They get violent?"

"Yup. The principal then has no choice, he's gotta close the school.

They open the school a week later, and it happens again. So they close the school a second time.

Meanwhile, the girls who started all this, they go back to their villages many many miles away, and this ... thing, whatever it is, spreads. Up and down the coast of Lake Victoria..."

"You mean people in the villages start to laugh?"

"Yup. In one village, 217 people start to laugh and cry. A second boarding school has to shut down.

And no one knows why."

Thus begins a Quite Interesting segment from Radio Lab's February 22^nd 2008 episode.

I had never heard Radio Lab before (the only other NPR show I've really gotten into is This American Life, and even then I prefer the video adaptation). But now I suddenly =get= why people listen to NPR.

Because it's fascinating.

Dollhouse

So, the latest Joss Whedon project has come to a close with the recent Dollhouse finale. Most of the loose ends were tied up, but one thing really bothered me: It's 10 years later, right? Wherefore does everyone look pretty much exactly the same as before? I mean, even down to HAIRSTYLE?

People's looks change a lot in ten years. Here's a picture of me just five years ago:


Now, compare that to a picture I took of myself this morning:


And that's after only FIVE years! Throughout the finale I had to keep reminding myself that this was 10 years after the previous episode. Could have been so much better.

Anyway. All's well that ends.

Mars Needs Moms!

A while back, I found this Berkeley Breathed book at Auntie's.



Disney is making a movie version of the book now, which if you know Berkeley and Disney, is incredible.

You can find a bit more of the story here (along with more history between Berkeley and Disney), but basically it's this:

Milo (the son) doesn't much care for the way his mom treats him (making him do chores and eat his vegetables), but when Martians kidnap her, well he has to do something, right? So he stows away on the alien ship to try and rescue her.

Now, for those of you in the bookstore with me at the time, you might remember my reaction to the book's ending. But if you really don't want it spoiled, I'll hide it. Show/Hide
...although it's not much of a spoiler, considering how much of it is on THE COVER!

Milo (on Mars) trips and falls and breaks the helmet of his spacesuit. The air escapes and he passes out, right as his mom finds him. Seriously, it's ALL ON THE COVER. Anyway, next page is double-spoilered. Show/Hide
Milo wakes up to find he is wearing an unbroken helmet.



Yeah. His mom took off her own helmet to save him. Milo finally understands the depth of his mother's love for him.

Overall, a pretty good book, if a bit abrupt at that one point. I'm curious how they plan to stretch this tiny story over a full-length movie though.

Semi-relatedly, here's an article Berkeley wrote about modern movies.

Swarley

So, I saw this video on The Daily What. It's a mashup of Frosty The Snowman and Barney Stinson. Show/Hide



I love it. I love Barney. I want to change my name to Swarley. Which brings me to the main point of today's post.

I google'd Swarley because I wasn't sure of the spelling (-y/-ey?). One of the results was a wikipedia page that talks about all the tie-ins.

There are websites for Marshall and Lily's wedding (a bit ruined by the show plug in the top right corner), a Pro-Swarley-name site.

And then we get to TedMosbyIsAJerk.com. W...ow.

Yes, that *IS* a 20-minute song about what a jerk Ted Mosby is. It also ends with a reverse easter egg.

Wendy the Waitress is the MOTHER! (of the goat)

(also, random BSG reference at ~13:30 made me laugh)

Starslip

I recently ran through the Starslip archives. Totally worth a read. Often funny, but sometimes very touching. I'll show you a taste with bits of the Jovia storyline.

Spoilers ahoy.

Memnon Vanderbeam is in love with Jovia, daughter of the King of Jupiter. He saved them from an assassination attempt.


Later, a critical flaw is discovered in Starslip technology.


Eventually the flaw catches up with them.


Memnon starts the ships computer processing a Starslip path back to a timeline where Jovia lives, a process that will take many years. In the meantime, the storyline moves along. But every once in a great while, you'll get episodes like this:


Much later, the ship's computer tells Memnon that they can use the partially-computed Jovia path to end a war. Jovia would still have died, but the war would be over (or avoided). This would mean starting the calculations over from the beginning. Memnon refuses.

But later, when Deep Time sets a bomb to go off that will eliminate the entire timeline...


Like I said, worth a read.

Primer

The recent XKCD has brought Primer back to the collective foreground.

I've seen many MANY people explaining the timeline in Primer, and with the exception of the 'birds nesting in the attic' (which I didn't catch when I watched it, because it was too far away from the Big-Reveal), they don't seem to add much to the conversation. The timeline didn't really seem complicated enough to need an explanation; it is internally consistent. The Big-Reveal follows the movie's logic. So, what's to explain, right?

So, is this an Internet joke? Like the 3-wolf-moon t-shirt reviews? It didn't occur to me until today, but is everyone just playing and I didn't get it? Like, if we all pretend that Primer is really complicated and unknowable, that makes it funnier? I kind-of get that.

V

Just watched the First-Look for the V remake (starts tomorrow), and I gotta say: I am underwhelmed.

There are so many problems here, I'm not sure where to begin. Yes, I know a giant spaceship filled with extra-terrestrials is not realistic, but I can suspend my disbelief on that. BUT, nobody is looking up until the thing is over a city? Really? It's presence comes as a huge surprise and nobody is ready?

That was a fine premise when the original V aired. These days, that shit would be all over Twitter before they got through the cloud layer, let alone navigated to the nearest metropolis.

(And of course there is also the problem of the terrible acting from 50+% of the characters we saw, but whatever)

So, bad acting + cheesy dialog + lack of realism? I predict blockbuster hit. And then weep for the state of society.

Important Things

I recently finally got around to watching Important Things with Demetri Martin. So far I've seen 1.5 episodes, and I have this to say: Demetri Martin is a Genius.

This show is great. Part stand-up, part sketch, part philosophy, each episode tackles one important thing.

And to show you how great it is, here are some clips.

The first episode was about Timing.

Timing - Anger Scene Management Show/Hide

Unfortunately, you get just a tiny taste in this mini-clip. You can see where it's going though. Actually, it goes even further than you'd think. :-/ Guess you'll have to catch it on re-run!

...or you could watch this low-quality YouTube video.


Timing - Time Gigolo Show/Hide

Argh! AGAIN you only get a small snippet of the full scene. Notice how the time changes after you start playing the video? What's that about?

(sorry, couldn't find a YouTube version of this one)


The second episode was about Power.

Power - Parking Fight Show/Hide

Finally a full scene!

Character Tweets

@wilw brought to everyone's attention that the Big Bang Theory characters have Twitter accounts.

Penny
Leonard
Sheldon
Wolowitz
Raj
Leslie

I don't know who's running the accounts (I do know that they aren't officially affiliated with the show) but whoever is doing it manages to do a FINE job of staying in-character. Tell me you can read Sheldon's tweets and not hear his voice?

Unseen Academicals

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork - not the old fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go going when you drop them. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they're in the mood for trying everything else.

The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt, which worries him, too. As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever. Because the thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.

Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!

Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel Unseen Academicalsis out now, and I've just finished reading it.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet, as until three quarters of the way through it was my favorite Pratchett book to date, but it fell apart at the weak ending.

Still, before the ending there were a number of great and moving bits, some snippets of which I will share with you below.

Here the Patrician and the Archchancellor are talking about soccer:

'In my day we were all so... so relentlessly physical. But if I was to suggest so much as an egg and spoon race these days they'd use the spoon to eat the egg.'

'Alas, I did not know your day was over, Mustrum,' said Lord Vetinari, with a smile.

Here the mysterious Mr. Nutt talks to Trev (a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can) and Glenda (a maker of jolly good pies) about Trev's father, a soccer legend killed by the game:

'Your father loved you, did he not?'

'Wot?' Trev's face reddened.

'He loved you, took you to the football, shared a pie with you, taught you to cheer for the Dimmers? Did he hold you on his shoulders so that you could see more of the game?'

'Stop talkin' about my dad like that!'

Glenda took Trev's arm. 'It's okay, Trev, it's all right, it's not a nasty question, really it isn't!'

'But you hate him, because he became a mortal man, dying on the cobbles,' said Nutt, picking up another undribbled candle.

'That is nasty,' said Glenda. Nutt ignored her.

'He let you down, Mister Trev. He wasn't the small boy's god. It turned out that he was only a man. But he was not only a man. Everyone who has ever watched a game in this city has heard of Dave Likely. If he was a fool, then any man who has ever climbed a mountain or swum a torrent is a fool. If he was a fool then so was the man who first tried to tame fire. If he was a fool then so was the man who tried the first oyster, he was a fool, too–although I'm bound to remark that, given the division of labour in early hunter-gatherer cultures, he was probably a woman as well. Perhaps only a fool gets out of bed. But, after death, some fools shine like stars, and your father is such a one. After death, people forget the foolishness, but they do remember the shine. You could not have done anything. You could not have stopped him. If you could have stopped him he would not have been Dave Likely, a name that means football to thousands of people.'

Nutt negotiates with a dwarf:

'Her? The Dark Lady? She can kill people with a thought!'

'She is my friend,' said Nutt calmly, 'and I will help you.'

Nutt has a mantra about Being Worthy, leading to this discussion with Trev:

'It is a skill. It can be learned.'

'An' that makes you worthy?'

'Yes.'

'An' who judges?'

'I do.'

(Not entirely unrelatedly, I read this passage in The Little Prince today:


"Then you shall judge yourself," the king answered. "that is the most difficult thing of all. It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom."

)

Some characters have undergone little changes (not sure how I feel about those yet), such as the teetotaler Patrician drinking a beer while telling this story:

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. 'I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.'

Nutt tells Glenda an interesting thing about ships:

'The interesting thing about ships is that the captains of ships have to be very careful when two ships are close together at sea, particularly in calm conditions. They tend to collide.'

'Because of the wind blowing, and that?' said Glenda, thinking: In theory this is a romantic-novel situation and I am about to learn about ships. Iradne Comb-Buttworthy never puts a ship in her books. They probably don't have enough reticules.

'No,' said Nutt. 'In fact, to put it simply, each ship shields the other ship from lateral waves on one side, so by small increments outside forces bring them together without their realizing it.'

(this is a metaphor about relationships; it even puns 'ships)

Glenda cleared her throat again. 'This thing with the ships…Does it happen quite quickly?'

'It starts quite slowly, but it's quite quick towards the end,' said Nutt.

If I could put smart in water...

'Can't you wizards do something?'

'Yes,' said Ponder. 'We can do practically anything, but we can't change people's minds. We can't magic them sensible. Believe me, if it were possible to do that, we would have done it a long time ago. We can stop people fighting by magic and then what do we do? We have to go on using magic to stop them fighting. We have to go on using magic to stop them being stupid. And where does all that end? So we make certain that it doesn't begin. That's why the university is here. That's what we do.'

Ah, punnery:

'We shall have to change our tactics to suit, then,' said Nutt.

'Are you nu—insane?'

Another thing I found interesting was that Amazon paired it up with And Another Thing...(the 6^th Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book) penned this time by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer. Of course, no one could ever replace DNA.

Television Piracy

Here's why I don't think that downloading TV shows off the Interwebs is a real threat to broadcasters:

I can get better quality picture and sound for FREE over the air with a simple antenna. Plus, I can get THAT faster than I can download it (often before it is even available for download).

Downloading has some advantages, I guess, but I have a DVR to capture off the air, which gives me most of them anyway.

And yes, for quality one can download the hi-res versions of a show, but a single episode of House is about as big as every episode of Important Things with Demetri Martin combined.

Just an observation.

(Also, if you ARE a downloader, and you have a fast enough connection, check out Hulu. Some of their streams are faster and higher-quality than your average cap, and the commercials are shorter than over-the-air)

DJ Paige Railstone

Alright, I totally lied about there not being a post today. So sue me.

Before I get to today's actual topic, take a brief listen to this: Show/Hide



Not bad, right? That's DJ Railstone (Paige Railstone). Haven't heard of her? I'm not surprised, almost nobody has, but you can find out a little more on omnictionary.

So now that you're possibly a bit more caught up on Railstone lore, you can watch this and appreciate it: Show/Hide

BTW, the Vlogbrothers are quite interesting. It was a completely random find.

But, I miss Ze.

Alright, TOMORROW there will be no post.

Nostalgia

On the Happy site I saw this line: "let’s get nostalgic"

I immediately thought of something I wanted to put on a T-Shirt. I even did a Google search first and found NO hits. Jackpot!



Unrelated, I saw this Digg article. "Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies"

This is a Demetri Martin joke. Someone even found a video in which he makes this exact joke. Show/Hide



Unfortunately, one of the OTHER jokes he makes is:

"I remember when I used to really be into nostalgia."

DAMN. IT.

The Magic Store

There aren't even really that many songs ABOUT rainbows, when you think about it. At least, I can't think of many.

Happy birthday, Jim.

Charlie Brooker

I've been watching Screenwipe recently. While the coverage of UK TV shows don't really interest me, I quite enjoy the behind-the-scenes bits where they talk about the process of making a TV show. Here's a clip from the first episode of series 2 (skip to around 5:30) Show/Hide


Easy as falling off a log!

Apparently, Brooker is working on a game-oriented show in a similar vein. Looking forward to it. ^_^

Press Your Luck

Ran across this interesting documentary on Michael Larson's legendary appearance on Press Your Luck. Never seen it? I wouldn't be surprised. It aired once in 1984, and wasn't shown again for 19 or so years. But, the highlights are part of the documentary.

Here is the first (of eleven) parts: Show/Hide

(link)