The Daily Grind

The café at Glasgow Science Centre, a few minutes before closing time.

Heroes.

• First series: absolute blast.
• Second series: pants.
• Third series: oh, for heaven’s sake.

Some random thoughts follow – pairing them with specific events from a specific episode is left as an exercise for those with too much time on their hands.

• Oh look. Somebody else who isn’t going to stay dead.
• Wait – have we seen this before, or just another plotline that’s exactly the same?
• Is this a flashback, or dèja vu?
• He… does what now? And the instant change in character motivations is due to what, exactly? Heck, at this point I’d settle for ‘vaguely.’
• Are they playing musical characters? Do they shuffle the parts for each episode to see which actor ends up playing which rôle? That would make sense of the characterisations, at least.
• Is she playing Gigi Edgley playing Chiana on Farscape? Who else moves their head like that? (damn, that’s a geeky observation…)
• “Heroes and Villains,” as a season title, is presumably a reference to characters being more interesting if they’re neither squeaky clean nor unrelievedly dark, but a shade of grey. It doesn’t mean that characters should be stripy.
• When do the dinosaurs come in? We haven’t had proper monsters yet. We want monsters, dammit. The annoying doctor doesn’t count. Monsters don’t do voiceover. There’s a union rule about it.
• Are they going to do a musical episode? Or one with no dialogue? Or a live one?
• Ooh! Oooh! Are they going to do an entirely improvised show? Oh, wait – how could we tell?
• A plot of the average number of lines per character per episode must closely parallel the arctic ice shelf thickness, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Sometimes I wish correlation implied causality, life would be simpler.

I start to wonder if Heroes is an exercise in Zen broadcasting: if the last episode turns out to be utterly fantastic, but by then nobody at all is watching, can it still win an Emmy?

The really interesting question, and one that’s going to keep people talking for years to come is: what happened? When the first series was so well-crafted, how could the subsequent shows be so so bad? Having dropped the ball, are they incapable of picking it up again, or was the first series some sort of bizarre extended fluke?

From one of the flight sim message boards I read (yes, yes, I know…), a link to this gallery of work by photographer Jessica Ambats. Gorgeous stuff, particularly in the dawn and dusk light. Personal favourites include the resplendent Grumman Mallard amphibian, and the portrait of author and pilot Richard Bach. Unfortunately it’s a Flash gallery, so I can’t link directly to those pictures.

This morning, a complaint:

Only two entries in what seems like weeks, and both for geeks. I can hardly bring myself to switch on the computer in the morning knowing that it will be a screenful of disappointment when I click on The Daily Grind. Students are suffering, shows are badly directed, my child thinks “Oh bugger” is what you say when you turn on the computer…
— Thanks, Patrick.

[Oh, and don’t miss the action stream thing here, which has my Twitter and other updates from around the web, compiled into a neat little microblog.]

I’ve groused in the past about how Final Cut’s font handling is broken, only allowing you to select its choice of typefaces, and screwing up weights for OpenType fonts, amongst others.

Here’s a solution: some hacked-up titling tools that allow you to type the full font name of your choice. It’s a work-around, really, but anything that allows me to lob a quick caption up in a font I actually choose, rather than one FCP picks for me, is welcome.

Also see Andy’s Basic Text plugin.

(via FreshDV)

I’d be hopeless in an American prison: I’d eat the unit of currency.

(via Kottke)

Today: the BBC News site. Front page, no less.

Of course, once you’ve seen one article pointing out how ubiquitous Trajan is, you’ve seen them all.

Flossie’s way of asking, from the other room, if I’d like some tea, was to send me this:

It’s a wordle composition of some of my posts here that feature the word ‘tea.’ Apparently, I mention tea rather a lot.

This is, I think, exactly what YouTube was built for.

Interesting and thoughtful article at El Reg about some odd attitudes appearing around the government’s new Council for Child Internet Safety.

I need to read up around all this, and actually read the Byron review. Thus far I’ve only dipped into the deluge, but I’ve an unexpected observation already: everything I’ve seen makes the assumption that children are consumers first, with their value as contributors a distant second if it’s considered at all.

This worries me even more than nonsense about premoderating content.

See also: Tim Davies. I’d point you to the UKCCIS website too, but as far as Google can tell, there isn’t one. Read into that what you will.