Barkerburgh

I’m just sayin’.

I guess the title just says it. Except that there’s this - no, never mind.

I’ve been waiting for this show since last fall.

As many of you know, I truly believe that Google will bring about the Singularity and activate Skynet. Seriously.

To be honest, I never saw the first movie for years after it was made, but when I finally did, I really liked it. The second one was almost as good, partly because of the twist, but the third one…

The premiere, two one hour episodes over two nights, wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be, ie on par with the BSG miniseries, or practically any episode of Earl, Gas, or 30, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was very much afraid it was going to be.

Really though, how wrong can you go with evil robots from the future, a borderline psychotic mother, and hackin’, fightin’ Jesus-boy?

I was very happy with the casting of Summer Glau and Lena Headey, and not discomfited by the rest of the casting.

I’m looking forward to more fight scenes where robots from the future throw each other through walls, unless they happen all the time.

I knew Starbuck wasn’t dead.

Nuff said.

Well, with the loan of an old Dell server and some judicious and meticulous fiddling with old peripherals etc, I now have a computer running. I have installed WAMP (Windows -Apache, MySQL, and PHP) and can now work on learning up on my PHP again!

For some reason, it took two or three different sound cards to find one that would work, even with the right drivers.

Because the server is all SCSI (ie no IDE connectors at all), I can’t access my old hard drives yet and it only has CD-ROM so I can’t watch DVDs, or other movies, but I can play games during commercials.

And weren’t the recent post-hiatus episodes of BSG and Heroes fairly kickass?

Halalarious!

To coin a phrase.

Actually, to steal a line from one of their own commercials.

Catch the first episode again tonight, Wednesday, January 10, at 8:00 EST in its regular timeslot on CBC! (No, they’re not paying me. They used to, ten years ago, but they walked me out. Another story. Never mind.)

Anyhoooo.

A) First episode. Establishes the milieu, the characters, the underflow and overflow of attitudes and prejudices in Mercy, Saskatchewan, involving the coming of a new imam, a former Toronto lawyer, to serve the small Muslim congregation. (There’s a scene where the old imam tries to hi-5 another character…you had to be there…)

2> Funny, happy, irritatingly normal, even with the terrorist scares, head-scarves, misinterpretations, and photo-ops.

iii] Happily looking forward to the next episode. Maybe there’ll be Cylons!

Okay, probably no Cylons, since they’re handling the whole small-town Canadian ignorant bigot thing so funnily.

I can laugh because I’m related to them. Small-town Canadian ignorant bigots, that is. Seriously. But I only acknowledge and exploit that relationship for humorous purposes, because I am otherwise bewildered by and ashamed of it.

The screen on the left is closest to me, so it appears larger. It is in fact my main computer monitor with a cable TV card. The top right is my good TV, but with a bit of colour control problems. Still watchable. The bottom right screen is my second best TV, with contrast problems.

What you’re seeing is from the latest BSG episode shown on Space (photo taken with my phone - I love saying that…) , a scene on the Cylon base star, with D’Anna, Caprica 6 and Baltar around the reincarnation tank of the strange mystic humanoid Cylon who D’Anna thinks is the font of all arcane knowledge, and maybe the way to the Final Five Cylons, whom we haven’t knowingly seen yet. I think Baltar is one, personally, because how else could he have survived the nuclear blast at the Caprican lakehouse mansion with Caprica 6, and then show up with his books to get on board the Raptor with nary a wound nor a hair out of place? Hmm?

Woohoo!

Scary! Exciting! Maddengly short! On again today at 5:00pm Eastern!

Well, I’m hooked. I’ve got a pretty basic freeware application that lets you mark the cells for what they might contain and then tells you if you’re right or wrong once you start filling the cells in for real. So right now it’s kinda like playing Doom in semi-God Mode, so I’m happy.

With that help, I’m down to about half an hour per medium skill game (ie, 1 or 2 cells with 3 or 4 filled in and the rest with 2 or 3.) I’m sure it would take much longer on paper, which I will try eventually.

A little annoying when I’d rather finish a timed game of Sudoku than watch my TV shows, but whaddaya gonna do?

Sometimes, you’re busy on the computer and you were watching something on Teletoon but it’s over and you don’t change the channel because you’re trying to figure out just what the frack about Dreamweaver anyway and then this new anime-esque CG show comes on and you’re mesmerised, kind of like when you started to watch the Battlestar Galactica mini-series and had to stop rebuilding your computer because you didn’t want to miss anything and this is the same. ‘Stunning‘ ain’t too cool a word.

It’s like 2251 and the Earth is all broken up into chunks that still orbit the core. Some of the chunks are big enough to support entire communities. There’s a government body called the Sphere and pirates. Water is very valuable, cuz like where are you going to find it? Oh, the pirates are rebels against the corrupt Sphere. Everybody flies everywhere. There’s a flying machine that’s like a cross between the Nautilus and Nuestra Senora de Atocha.

The official site is here.

From the Wikipedia article: “Skyland, is a CGI cartoon developed in partnership in Canada/France/Luxembourg for the television channels Teletoon (in Canada), the NickToons Network (USA), Canal France 2 (France) and CiTV (Channel and slot on ITV1 in the UK). It was launched on April 22, 2006, at 7:30 pm on Teletoon. A one hour, worldwide preview was aired on November 26, 2005 at 7:00 PM or 8:00 PM EST and again and 11:00 PM as well as at 8:00 PM and 11:00 the following day. The show is produced by Paris’s Method Films and Toronto’s 9 Story Entertainment.”

They appear to have used motion-capture for the people, and realistically imaginative exquisite backgrounds. Tonight they had a chunk of Ile-de-France that contained the Metro station Charles de Gaulle-Etoile. I’ve actually been there. Who could have prognosticated?

This show is as pretty to look at as Dragonbooster, but with way more substance. I can say that authoritatively, having only seen one and a half episodes of Skyland (op. cit.).

Google string for ’skyland teletoon’

(Yeah, I know. I said I was going to watch every episode of Distraction. I’ve seen like three.)

PS, and apropos of nothing, Anneli can do Chewbacca, and I can’t. One of her family cats can do a better Yoda than I do.