herewiss13

It's a little early to tell if this show will be of comparable caliber to the Sarah Connors Chronicles, but it has some potential:

1) He named his dog "36".  It's a lovely little detail about what immortality really means.

2) He forges (?) his own antiques.  If you age your own work to make it look like furniture pieces you made decades ago, is it a crime?

3) The "knowing everything" thing might get a little old.  He's not "John Doe", but I suppose you do pick up on thing in 400 years.

4) He's completely open about how long he's lived, but no one ever believes him.  They think he jokes.  This is hysterical.

5) The hidden workplace/batcave is great.  The wall of catalog cards was especially impressive, I thought.

6) The romance angle ought to drive the plot-arc along, but hopefully won't consume the entire show.

7) The trailer for Thursday's episode made a Highlander joke! :-P

8) Speaking of Highlander, this show seems to have a better grasp of the _continuity_ of history.  Highlander was about "Ago" and "Now."  But New Amsterdam tried several times to show the actual flow of years around the main character.  His photo essay of Time Square (?) was especially poignant.

9) Speaking of Highlander again: he's had kids!  Much different Immortal!Angst than McLeod's infertility!angst.

10) Speaking of history: good call on New York.  Lots of time and events there to dig into.

11) For someone who keeps complaining about the ennui of immortality, John does seem to keep himself busy and enjoy life (if only in a low-key way).  OTOH, I suppose that's the only way to _combat_ the ennui of immortality.  Still, I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who seems to have everything together (except a soulmate).

To sum up: They treat the "immortality" theme with respect and whimsy, but it remains to be seen if the rest of the show can match up to it.  I'm glad we've got another episode on Thursday to evaluate.

...actual life updates to follow...eventually.

I don't play First Person Shooters.  This game almost convinces me otherwise.

It's the bastard lovechild of Half-life and Pixar's "The Incredibles".

http://orange.half-life2.com/tf2.html

Go watch the trailers...especially the little square trailers at the bottom (character profiles for the different attack classes)... and especially the middle trailer.

It's Crack, I tell you!  Crack!

I'm not sure how to describe this video clip, other than the fact that it takes tagging, feeds, links, & reccomendations, all the tools and techniques of the "modern" internet...and translates them into metaphor.

It's extremely clever and somewhat surrealistic.  Your mileage will vary proportionately to your web usage & overall geekery. ;-)

http://www.glumbert.com/media/supermarket

Watched "Blood Ties" last night, the TV series adaptation of Tanya Huff's "Blood" books.  It was really quite good.  The first episode was a 2-hour adaptation of the first book (the rest of the first season will be all original stories) and I was deeply impressed with the fidelity of the translation from text to screen.

I was also very happy to learn that, after the 2 hour premiere, it'll be airing at 10 o'clock, so I won't have to choose between it and the Dresden Files (see previous rant).

The most interesting part of the evening, though, was watching the commercials.  'Blood Ties' airs on Lifetime and I discovered that, as a 20-something male bachelor, I was pretty much the antithesis of their targeted demographic.  It was almost like watching advertisements from another world.;-)

After that final scene. I wonder if we now know where Peter gets his scar: as in:

Future!Hiro: "You look different without the scar."

On the other hand, since he can channel Clare, how could he get any scar at all in the first place?

...it's going to be a long two months.

...and if I'm in India for the return episode, I'll be very put out.

We had a bit of a two-fer today.  First, female chimpanzees making spears...and almost certainly using them to hunt bush babies.  The evidence is only preliminary and the link between tool and ultimate action is still somewhat tenuous, but I'm trying to figure out a different reason to strip down long sticks, sharpen the end of them and then pound them into tree hollows.  It's certainly an intriguing first step and suggests that early hominid were probably using tools for quite awhile before moving into the medium of stone.  It also threatens to turn the regular hunter/gatherer paradigm upside-down.

...initially I had a joke about women, violence and PMS, but decided it just wasn't all that funny.  I'm sure someone else will come up with it independently, though.  Maybe their version won't flop before lift-off.

***

And for all the cephalo-philes out there (and LJ seems to have a lot of them), the first intact specimen of a Colossal Squid, the Giant Squid's larger, beefier brother (who also has large hooks on his tentacles).  They've got it on ice in the trawler that caught it, and I'm looking forward to more pictures in the near future.

***

Finally, just for kicks, another National Geographic film clip about Ornithological Courtship Behaviors that tries very hard to be amusing.  If you enjoy science stand-up comedy* listen to the narration, otherwise, just enjoy some fairly striking feather-dance.


*What is it about science and humor?  A good 2/3rds of my science teachers, right up through college, thought themselves to be the next Robin Williams...or perhaps Henny Youngman.  The other 3rd were pretty much devoid of all sense of humor and quite possibly lit chalk-dust scented candles to relax at the end of a hard day's lecturing.

Anyone who still remembers my "cancer as a research medium for virii" train of thought will be pleased to know that I've been beaten to the punch.  While reading (re-reading, actually) "The Demon in the Freezer" by Richard Preston (in re: Anthrax & Smallpox), I stumbled across a single sentence in which the scientist is described culturing pox virii in a test-tube of cervical cancer cells...a cell culture that was collected from a tumor in the 1950s and has been cultivated and used ever since.

...the book did not then go on to mention if the next step: onco-phage virii were in the works...but the author was dealing with other, more infectious subjects.

*Googles*

There's a cancer vaccine treatment called Oncophage but it doesn't appear to be viral in nature.