From Streetcars To Spaceships

OK, I admit it, Burn Notice did something very cool.

A friend of mine just posted a video from San Diego ComicCon. The team that does Burn Notice did a special series of "advice from a spy" shorts on, yes, optimizing your time at ComicCon. How to deal with having two panels you want to see scheduled for the same timeslot. How to maximize your take of swag. And so on. Jeffrey Donovan did a great job at keeping a straight face while reading out of a script that was full-on comics nerd in both goals and jargon.

Sadly, I'm not posting the youTube link since those things get takedowns in hours or less.

Lots of media companies spend money on cons these days. Plenty even send their stars for panels. And with Bruce Campbell in the cast they must have had some lead on what this all is like. But even so, major points for style, guys. Money is nice. Stars are nice. But actually tying up your production staff to make something directed not at your television audience but just at our geeky hearts.

Shiny.

-Rustin

Put half a pound of equipment in orbit for $8,000.

Seriously. The PongSat and the CubeSat have been succeeded (joined?) by the TubeSat. You can find the Slashdot thred here. What better proof do we need that the cost to orbit of all kinds of goods is going to way down? At the very least, the kind of expertise that comes from this many iterations will be wonderful and will help more people make a living and build credentials in helping get humans really living out past the earth's surface. Which, among other things, makes more obviously viable a nobody-owns-it successor to the internet, with groups of techies just shooting up an open-protocol sat or three whenever they get some cash put together. Tell that to the big telcos and government bluestockings.

Ya know, there's just no way that anybody could have anticipated a thing like this.

Oh, yeah. Right. I did. Over ten years ago.

To all of you MBA-types, techies, and cocktail party sages who took considerable and condescending glee in "explaining" to me that I "just didn't understand how the real world works", allow me to take this chance to say, once again, fuck you.

-Rustin

The SciFi Channel is being renamed WHAT?

So I see that The SciFi Channel is being renamed SyFy with the tagline "Imagine Greater".

Seriously. I'm not kidding. Here's the new site, complete with press release: http://www.syfy.com

From what I can see, this is mostly about their wanting a unique brand identity instead of a name built around a descriptor that they can't control. But since they didn't want to do anything daring like actually come up with a new name, they just changed the spelling. Brilliant, huh? Then they added a tagline which sounds like it was created by some guys who want to sound like the Think Different campaign but have no real understanding of why it works.

“We couldn’t own Sci Fi; it’s a genre,” said Bonnie Hammer, the former president of Sci Fi who became the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions. “But we can own Syfy.”

This article covers the issues pretty well: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/business/media/16adcol.html

Here are some other responses:
http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/64356/sci-fi-channel-becoming-syfy-huh
http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/sci_fi_channel_aims_to_shed_ge.php

Evidently they're anxious to dissociate themselves from those of us who actually care about fiction that takes seriously things like, ya know, actual science.

So, if they're going to call it "SyFy" I say let's pronounce it "siffy". They want to change their perception in the marketplace away from icky things like actual science. I say that we should help them with that distancing process.

I intend to go around making excuses to say the phrase "siffy - the syphilis channel" in a fake, perky, marketer-speak voice. My friend Kate Gowers has already picked up the ball and has added her own nefarious touch - spelling it "syffy". It's amazing how adding one more F makes the appropriate pronunciation clear. I intend to start doing the same.

Of course, to an old comics geek like me, that pronunciation also evokes the "hsiffys" of early Cerebus, adding all the "now I need to wash" associations of Dave Sim plus bonus ones of anti-intellectualism, racism, jingoism, and media manipulation.

Sounds about right to me.

Not to mention that syphilis is all about decreased brain function, loss of reasoning skills and judgement, becoming more prone to fits of violence and leering, crude sexuality. All of which just happen to describe pretty accurately recent trends of the channel in question.

Let's just all keep saying the phrase at every opportunity. See if we can get it to propagate. I'm talking to all of you science fiction fans, comics geeks, and other current or likely future members of their demographic. Let's see what we can do to make the association reflexive so seeing the logo causes the phrase to instantly, automatically pop up in everybody's mind.

"siffy - the syphilis channel".

Happy propagating,

Rustin

Consequences in Fiction, Part Two

So I see that yesterday's post has already drawn traffic searching on the phrase "burn notice". Good. Especially since the last straw for me had been having Sam, one of the lead characters, getting beaten and interrogated for three days (unless I'm misunderstanding the timeline in the episode) and, as soon as he's untied, standing up (after three days tied to a chair?!), running into combat, and, as soon as it's over, being casually dropped off at his place looking no more than a bit tired, with just a manly "thank you, brother".

Okay, now I've never been tortured, but I've gotta say that I think that almost three weeks tied to a bed in a burn ward gives me a little to say about this, especially since I kept flashing back to those weeks while I watched the torture scenes. And I can tell you now that after three days tied to a chair, frequently with his mouth duct-taped shut (which, by the way, in a hot, enclosed space like that would have almost certainly killed him right there), being beaten, interrogated, screamed at, and spending most of the rest of the time alone in that dark metal room, he wouldn't even be able to lift his arms or walk, let alone jump into manly action. And when they go out? I'm sorry, but just about anybody would have fucking well fallen over sobbing. Would he, maybe, in theory, wait for his buddy to drive away? Possibly. But one way or another he would be very, very fucked up indeed and a couple of smart guys like those, old pros as they're supposed to be, would have acknowledged that in no uncertain way.

So, just to let y'all know, that was the thing that inspired my previous post.

And, as it happens, my timing was good. Looks like Slashdot has a thread going right now about torture in fiction based on an expansion pack for WoW, and the article they link to turns out to be about just the same point as my previous post, about the stories that fiction tells about actions having consequences. Or not.

And you know what? I think that the article says these things damned well. So I'm done. Go read it. You'll be glad that you did.

Episodic TV Is Fundamentally Evil. Really.

At the recommendations of first my friend Matt and then my mother, I just watched the first season of Burn Notice on Hulu. In the past few years I've been trying to experience more in the way of mainstream American culture since I feel that anybody who wants to have useful conclusions about social policy better have some idea of how the people in that society actually live.

So in some ways I've found it fun, charming, certainly pretty. But by the end of the first season my disgust with it had finally reached the boiling point.

Now I could tell you what plot points and what production issues and what tricks of lighting and casting and editing nailed it down for me but let me jump to the chase.

Conventional episodic television is built around "normal" people (ones carefully engineered to fundamentally feel sympathetic to the audience) constantly doing extraordinary things. Over and over. And simultaneously doing them in an amped up way that is ten or twenty or a hundred times more eventful than real life.

And then being there for the next episode to do it all again.

What does this mean?

That conventional episodic television is, by definition, built around a world of actions without consequences. People get shot at and two days later are shaking it off in ways that make PTSD seem like some silly myth. They get married and divorced and married again but are still making the same jokes. They are pernicious fantasies and they have real impacts on people's personal behaviors, on how they teach their children, how they deal with each other, and vote.

Enormous numbers of events happen on any episodic television show of the sort that would utterly reshape people's lives but they can't change much or too fast because if they did the show wouldn't ever be able to sell in syndication.

One of the basic guiding realities of television is that a hell of a lot of the possible profits on a show come not from when it first airs but from when it airs again and again and again. And when the DVDs sell. And from sales of just the sort of licenced merchandise that depends on characters staying very much the same. So it is a rock solid rule of television production that you're always going for a bare minimum of three seasons worth of episodes. Episodes that need to have pretty much the same people doing pretty the same thing in pretty much the same kind of place. All while living through at least fifty to one hundred events of the sort that would, in the real world, guarantee that such consistency would never, ever happen.

Now you can spout all you want about Battlestar Galactica and The Sopranos and House all that mahooah. But let's get real here, the Galactica's pilots would never, ever be able to have the kind of mortality counts they supposedly have and still have Starbuck and Apollo and all the "important" pilots both predictably take on insane risks and reliably get away with it. "Oh, you say, but Apollo had a really scary time that once and had to wait for rescue for hours!" Yeah, whatever. If you believe that this refutes my statement, then somewhere deep in your mind you know that you're rationalizing.

"But that's just television" you say. What does that mean, exactly? Explain to me how being able to describe why this is done (a thing that I understand full well) makes it somehow exempt from being destructive. A destructive thing is destructive UNLESS IT DOESN"T DAMAGE THINGS. "But they have a reason" is fundamentally a non-sequitur if what we're discussing is whether or not it causes a given result. Charles Manson had reasons. Executives at General Motor and McDonalds and Enron have had plenty of reasons. Having reasons does not change the basic fact that those actions have had consequences. "But that's just the way things are" has been the best protection of segregationists, slave traders, war profiteers, and oppressors and underminers of decent lives of a thousand different stripes for all the history of the known world. When something makes an impact on our world we need to look past "but that's just how things are". And whether people want to face it or not, these shows are created to make an impression.

And they do. Every time you watch an episode of a television show you are being exposed to a brilliantly seductive world, one that tries harder and with greater skill every year to give the superficial appearance of credibility, in which people are constantly rewarded for and and evade the changes that would come from their actions and circumstances. Actions and circumstances that relate to ones we engage in or at the least are expected to make decisions about all through our lives. Every hour you watch this stuff you're being seduced. You're being brainwashed. And the "realistic" shows like the Sopranos, with their high production values and skillful writing, are the one that will brainwash you the most and the fastest.

Count on it.

Beware the doctrine of a "right to profit".

Increasingly, corporations are pushing a deeply dangerous doctrine under various disguises, that they have a "right" to a profit. Not only that, but that this "right" supercedes other rights, like those of an individual to be secure in their home, as we've recently seen in municipalities using eminent domain to clear land for a mall. To say that this is pernicious is like saying that water is wet. And it is being used to defend a wide range of sleazy behaviors.

The latest round of this is that telecoms are suing municipalities for daring to build publicly funded internet access. Evidently there is something "wrong" with the city pursing the public good in a way that doesn't turn a profit.

This Slashdot piece provides more links and discussion.

To quote the Law.com piece:

Attorneys for telecommunications companies say the litigation is needed because municipalities with the ability to borrow money cheaply -- and not hobbled by the need to return a profit -- have unfair competitive advantages.

"Our position has never been that it is unlawful for cities to do this, but you can't use your powers as a city to create an uneven playing field," said David Goodnight in Stoel Rives' Seattle office, who has represented Qwest ... against cities in numerous suits...

Goodnight cited an association of Utah cities formed to promote the construction of a broadband networks in smaller cities and rural areas. "What we found during discovery was that the cities were providing facilities and personnel at no cost, interest-free loans and, in some instances, outright cash infusions," he said.

Yes, that's right. Since when is there anything wrong with that? Is is "unfair" for a city to allow a parks department to "borrow money cheaply", or to provide "facilities and personnel" to, say, the local schools?

Not everything in life is about profit. And profit is not some sacred thing above all others. I was pretty active in the politics of the internet through the mid-nineties as the telecoms constantly tried to get all the benefits of being providers of an essential service (the right to stop traffic at rush hour on a busy street to install new lines, favored access to government facilities, etc.) while constantly chipping away at their obligations, trying to create crippled, low-end offshoots to be the carriers of last resort, to prevent their being expected to provide trustworthy dialtone, to, more recently, not have to provide 911 services.

You don't get it both ways, boys and girls. Either telecom is a basic part of modern life, as essential function of the sort that government has not only a right but an obligation to see provided to the public at a reasonable cost in an accessible fashion, in which case it's entirely justified for them to respond aggressively to over twenty years of rising fees in a field defined by breathtakingly declining costs. Or telecom is a trivial and non-essential product, no more central to modern life than whiffle ball, in which case all of the past hundred-plus years of government implicit and explicit subsidies, from government funding to use of eminent domain, should not only end immediately, they should be repaid, ASAP.

I think that you know where I stand.