newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Sunday, October 18, 2020
Lower Decks may finally be the new Star Trek we grow to love
Now that its first season has ended, Star Trek: Lower Decks finds itself in a strange new world — a new Star Trek TV show with good reviews.
Discovery and Picard have not fared well with the critics. The biggest problem is that these shows don’t feel like the Star Trek we’ve come to know and love over the years. In the end, what critics and fans want is Star Trek: The Next Next Generation.
Picard, despite the presence of the main character in TNG, plus the presence of three others, didn’t cut it. For one thing, this version of Picard (the character) is old and tired. For another, he’s no longer the captain of the best starship in the fleet — he’s merely the leader of a band of renegades.
Lower Decks, on the other hand, takes us back to the TNG days with no apologies. Their ship isn’t as great as the Enterprise, but it looks and functions the same. Although it’s played for comedy, the feel is like good old TNG.
At least three of the old TNG characters have shown up, and they are young and vital — like they were before.
The first reviews for Lower Decks, based on the first four episodes released to critics, were mostly not good.
Alan Sepinwall, for Rolling Stone: “Whatever the reason, Lower Decks is the latest disappointment in the Star Trek stewardship of CBS All Access and producer Alex Kurtzman.”
Mike Hale, for the New York Times: “There are several Prime Directives being violated there, one having to do with lazy joke writing.”
By the time we get to the finale, things are looking better, Swapna Krishna, writing for Vulture (part of New York magazine), says “Mike McMahan and his team deliver a funny, heartfelt, and satisfying conclusion that holds a lot of interesting implications for the second season of the show.”
And: “All in all, this was a strong and well-written first season.”
At Comic Years, Joshua M. Patton sums up the shift in feelings toward Lower Decks:
“Humor is subjective, of course. So, while more than a few scenarios in this series didn’t work for me, there were plenty that did. The holodeck episode and the episode about the Starfleet medical colony were two particularly standout episodes. They were able to leverage the idea of Starfleet as something less-than a force for good into some great comedy. However, the Star Trek: Lower Decks finale episode is the pinnacle of the season, perhaps intentionally so.”
Assuming that Lower Decks will continue to improve in Season 2, there is much to look forward to.
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Saturday, April 23, 2016
Netflix is a good deal, even if you have to follow the rules
Some Canadians are acting like spoiled children over the fact that Netflix is actually enforcing its own rules.
No, you aren’t allowed to use VPN to watch content reserved for other countries. This is in the terms of service you agreed to when you signed up for Netflix.
But many Canadians went ahead and paid for VPN service anyway, somehow thinking that it was OK to break their agreement with Netflix. I guess some of us figured that Netflix wasn’t serious, that they were just paying lip service to their own agreements with content providers.
Now it turns out they were serious after all. If you try using a VPN to watch shows on the U.S. version of Netflix, you get blocked.
(VPN, for the uninitiated, stands for virtual private network. It allows you to pretend that you are accessing the Internet from another country, thus circumventing restrictions based on geography.)
Outraged subscribers haven taken to social media to announce that they are leaving Netflix. How dare they treat us like second-class citizens.
Second class? That reasoning comes from that the difference in the number of shows offered to Americans vs. Canadians — despite being charged about the same amount. In the U.S., you get to choose from 7,000 shows. In Canada, it is a mere 4,000.
Never mind that 90 per cent of it is junk that you would dream of wasting your time on. Never mind that you could never watch that many shows in a lifetime. Apparently, there are a few gems that they get, but we don’t. It also works the other way around from time to time — but never mind that, too.
This leaves me to wonder where the Netflix quitters intend to go. There are a couple of Canadian streaming services— Showmi and CraveTV. They cost a bit more and rarely produce excellent original content of the kind that can be found on Netflix.
Cable TV is still as big a rip-off as ever, even with new regulations forcing cable companies to offer a $25 package. That’s three times what you pay for Netflix, and the shows — if you find any you like — are swamped with annoying ads. You would be further ahead, in terms of value and choice, paying for all three streaming services.
Neflix CEO Reed Hastings calls the complainers “a very small but quite vocal minority. It’s really inconsequential to us.”
I’m inclined to believe him. All you have to do is look at the data. A total of 190,000 Canadians cut the cable in 2015 — an 80-per-cent increase over the year before. The two main reasons are the high price of cable and the convenience of Netflix.
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Saturday, October 24, 2015
Steve Jobs movie all about drama
With Steve Jobs the movie, Steve Jobs the man has made the transition from real life to mythology.
If you want to watch a drama about a person who resembles the man who built Apple into the success it is today, then by all means go see the movie. Just don’t expect to learn much about really happened.
The best comparison I’ve seen is with Citizen Kane. The classic by Orson Welles was loosely based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Heart. Welles changed the names so he could freely use creative licence — and in the process created a masterpiece.
Aaron Sorkin did more or less the same thing, offering an interpretive drama about Jobs’ life, but instead kept the real names. The result is outright inaccuracies and a heavy emphasis on Jobs’ initial denial surrounding a daughter born out of wedlock.
Every book about Jobs mentions this tragic episode, but Sorkin dwells on it. I can’t say I blame a movie maker for doing this. After all, most people — even though computers are an integral part of our lives — aren’t really that interested in the technology behind them.
Jobs spent most of his life creating products, but in the end we all know that no matter how great the fruits of our labours might be, the thing that really counts in life is our relationships with family and friends. Anyone who has ever had a child will respond emotionally to a father rejecting his daughter.
Many people think he did this because he was obsessed with succeeding in his career — that he feared having to help raise a baby would be a fatal distraction. And yet, amid all this denial, he named a computer after her — the Lisa. This computer is long forgotten, but the story behind its naming will long endure as an example of the complexity we are capable of when it comes to family.
Of course, he later came to accept her, raised her as part of his family, and there was a happy ending.
Still, this is not the movie I want to see. In fact, now that Jobs is dead, I don’t know if it’s possible to tell the kinds of stories about him that were truly exciting.
The books I enjoyed about Jobs and Apple were written while he was alive — and refused to co-operate with the authors. Many of the people interviewed for these books were afraid to have their names used for fear of angering a powerful man.
Jobs had a reputation for having a quick temper in his younger years, and people working in the tech industry didn’t want to get on his bad side. So these books read like secrets revealed. You knew that people were taking risks by talking.
Perhaps the best of these was Apple Confidential by Owen W. Linzmayer. You can still find it on Amazon.
These days, you can say anything you like about Jobs — even make stuff up. If Sorkin’s movie takes off, Jobs could turn into a commodity to be exploited, like other dead celebrities. That would be shame because his real story — tons of stuff I haven’t mentioned — was already fascinating.
I’ve read the eponymous biography by Walter Isaacson that was authorized by Jobs. It’s accurate but the writing is kind of ho-hum. A new book, called Becoming Steve Jobs, is supposed to be better. People who knew him say it is not only historically accurate, but also does a good job of capturing the essence of the man. Maybe I’ll put it on my Christmas wish list.
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Friday, July 3, 2015
Apple Music could help streaming music go mainstream
Napster is now a distant memory, but in its hay days between 1999 and 2001 when the site freely shared pirated songs, it was the scourge of the music industry. Apple opened the iTunes music store in 2003, made it easy to download paid-for music, and now Napster is a distant memory.
Over 10 years later, the music industry is again struggling to keep up with technology. Streaming services have become the more popular way to listen to music, but between ad support and small monthly fees, many musicians are paid less than ever.
So can Apple come to the rescue again? A new Music app and beefed-up iTunes software built on technology obtained in the company’s buyout of Beats may be cause for some cautious optimism.
If you have tried services such as Spotify or Rdio, you already have a good idea of how streaming works. Typically you pay a monthly fee of around $10 for access to millions of songs that you can play whenever you want. These services usually have a free tier with limited selection as well.
Apple Music isn’t hugely innovative, but it does have key features that could make a difference.
One of these is called Beats 1 — a worldwide radio station with live DJs who spin tunes around the clock. They even take requests. If you have iTunes (a free download for Mac or Windows) or the Apple Music app, you can have a listen for free. The music is an eclectic mix, and it’s definitely youth oriented — so oldsters be warned.
(Beats 1 and the other radio stations didn’t work for me at first on iTunes. The solution was to sign out, then sign back in.)
What makes it interesting is that with talented DJs picking the music, millions of listeners can discover new tunes. After all, even if you do pay for a streaming service, you’re going to wind up playing the songs you’re familiar with. Beats 1 opens the door to exploration.
Another feature that’s intriguing is called For You. You have to sign up to get this, but the first three months are free so why not? If you’re afraid you’ll forget to cancel, here are instructions on how to turn off auto renewal in the app.
For You reminds me of news apps like Flipboard and Prismatic. The more you use it, the more it gets to know your taste in music and is better able to come up with suggestions you will enjoy.
You start off by tapping on the genres you like, then go to pick your favourite artists. This helps For You pick out an initial set of playlists. After that, when a song is playing that you like, you can tap on a heart icon to give the app further guidance.
While the playlists are chosen by some sort of computer-generated algorithm, the playlists themselves are created by humans. That means you get a nice set of songs that blend together well. I’m hoping it also means that you don’t get a lot of repetition — algorithms seem slow to notice that you’ve moved on to other interests.
Jim Dalrymple has put together a good primer on how to use the For You like system.
These two features alone won’t lead the music industry to the promised land of economic sustainability, but there is one advantage that only Apple can deliver — sheer volume. The company continues to sell millions of iPhones, and every one of them has Apple Music on the home screen.
Another thing going for it is the trend toward using Internet-based services for entertainment. If all you did was pay $8 a month for Netflix and $10 a month for Apple Music (or something like it), you’d have pretty much all the diversion you could handle. That’s a pretty good deal.
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Saturday, May 30, 2015
How much are you willing to pay for Google's new photo service?
A new service called Google Photos is pretty much everything you could ask for — free unlimited storage of your photos and videos, accessible from any device. Everything is automatically backed up and tagged so you can easily find it with a search. There’s even built-in editing for touch-ups.
So what’s not to like?
Google Photos was only released a few days ago, but already plenty of people are jumping on the bandwagon. Other than a few naysayers, the App Store is full of four- and five-star reviews.
Some people are already talking about dumping the Photos app that comes with their iPhone and replacing it with Google’s app. At Fortune magazine, Philip Elmer-DeWitt says “Apple should hate itself today.”
It’s easy to forget that Google’s entire existence is based on collecting data, analyzing it, and selling the results. Making it easy, even desirable, for people to give them billions of photos from all over the world fits right in with the company’s business model. Rene Ritchie puts it this way:
Google is pushing out fantastic new features at a breakneck pace, but all of them are ones I need to go into with eyes wide open. Google wants to organize the world’s data. To do that, it needs the data. It needs us to provide it, and it needs us to want to provide it. Everything Google does is based on that single truth.
Over at The Loop, Dave Mark advises us to read the licence agreement carefully:
The way I read it (and I’m no lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt), at the very least, Google has the right to use your photos in its advertising.
Well, you might say, Google has been using our stuff for years and really what harm is there in it? Every search we make with Google, every email we send with Gmail, is catalogued in massive banks of servers somewhere — they are just tiny drops in an ocean of data.
Even so, many people resent that Google is taking liberties with the things they create. Some, for example, insist on using Duck Duck Go for search, because it’s totally anonymous. I’ve tried it a few times but always come back to Google for the simple fact that it gives better results.
Plenty of good alternatives make it easy to do without Gmail, but time and again I find Google presenting simple solutions to things I want to accomplish. For example, I was looking at creating an online guided tour, and — lo and behold — there is such a thing as Google Tour Builder that does just that.
Google also makes it easy to create calendars and charts and embed them on websites. The list goes on and on. In the end, the loss of privacy may be a small price to pay for such a long list of features.
So what’s the bottom line with Google Photos?
One of the big promises of the service is that your photos are automatically organized and searchable. The price you pay is that Google is busy organizing and searching every photo and video not just for you, but also for its own purposes.
It’s something to think about.
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Saturday, December 20, 2014
How The Interview got way more publicity than it deserved
I wonder if Seth Rogen has ever seen Mel Brooks’ 1968 classic movie, The Producers.
It’s about two guys who hatch a scheme to make money by deliberately producing a theatrical flop on Broadway. The play — even though it’s about Hitler — turns out to be a hit and they are ruined. The movie ends with the conniving pair working on more outlandish ideas, because there never seems to be a shortage of suckers.
Did Rogen have something similar in mind with The Interview, a movie he made for Sony that features another dictator who has has become a pop culture caricature?
Let’s face it, the plot of The Interview is thin. Two journalists are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. First of all, no journalists would be competent enough to carry out such a scheme. And second, even if they succeeded, Kim would simply be replaced by the powers behind the throne.
Rogen claims to have done a lot of research about North Korea, so he probably learned that its government is predictable. Any threat, no matter how inconsequential, even if it’s just a stupid stoner movie, is met with bombastic warnings of retaliation.
Sure enough, Rogen poked them with a stick and they responded. Now the FBI says it has evidence that North Korea is behind hacking into Sony’s computers and that the country is supporting threats against movie-goers.
Suddenly, The Interview is not just another flop that would have been forgotten two weeks after its release. It’s a cause célèbre among columnists everywhere, and firmly implanted in the public psyche. Yes, even the jaded newsonaut has found it impossible to ignore.
Things may have gone too far when Sony decided not to release the movie, but it could still wind up on DVD and be distributed through online rentals. So don’t feel sorry for Rogen and Sony just yet.
And if none of this is true, if the whole thing is just a mess of ineptitude, I can still imagine Rogen sitting back and having a good laugh at absurdity of it all.
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Saturday, November 29, 2014
Science fiction leads the way in promoting gender equality
Last week, I wrote about the Bechdel test, which measures how well the entertainment industry promotes gender equality. It seems simple enough — in order to pass, all you need is two female characters with names talking to each other about something other than men. In my experience with TV and books, this turned out to be a rare occurrence.
Since then, I’ve had better luck. Women in several shows I’ve watched have talked to each other about many subjects.
One series that has this in abundance is The Walking Dead. Does that mean that only in a zombie-apocalypse can we imagine women taking on positions of leadership? I hope not. Another one, via my daughter, is My Little Pony. Almost all the characters are female, and they solve problems threatening their world without the help of males on a regular basis.
This brings me to a proposal I would make for beefing up the Bechdel Test. I would like to see the characters talking about how to resolve issues. Tension in drama is often created by presenting the characters with a big task that may not be possible to accomplish given time constraints or opposition from other characters. We look with admiration to those who find ways to overcome these difficult situations.
It could be that we are beginning to see major steps in this direction within the realm of science fiction. This is a genre where writers have often used a future vision or a fantasy world to help present their ideas on how society could or should be.
David Levesley has a piece in The Daily Beast that sees feminism showing up in two sci-fi TV shows: Doctor Who and The Legend of Korra.
That’s why stories that allegorize and analyze abortion or sexual assault are so interesting: they are not just about improving the representation of women, they seek to improve the discussion around them. By extrapolating these topics away from the individual and placing them as higher-stakes problems, what can seem like obtuse or gender-specific topics can be universal concerns if only because viewers are asked to engage with them in a way detached from their complex real-world implications.
As you may know, Doctor Who is an alien time traveller who morphs every couple of years so he can be played by a different actor. For some reason, though, this character — who supposedly is not of our world — only changes into white men. Would it be too unbelievable for us Earthlings if the doctor became a woman? Given that Doctor Who spends much of his time rescuing damsels in distress, it would indeed make things complicated.
Or what if the doctor turned into a black man? If you don’t think that would be a big deal, check out the discussion that ensued when the recently released trailer for the new Star Wars movie showed a black stormtrooper. Kriston Capps writes in The Atlantic:
Earlier today, it seemed like #BlackStormtrooper might actually eclipse #BlackFriday as a trending topic. That’s because the official trailer that aired Friday for the next film in the Star Wars saga— The Force Awakens, directed by J.J. Abrams and scheduled for release in December 2015 — opens on a black man wearing a stormtrooper’s uniform.
Capps makes a good case for black stormtroopers, but why does it even have to be an issue?
Well, at least we’re talking these things out, and saner heads seem to be prevailing for now. And we should keep on talking, because — due to human nature — there may never be a time when we are blind to gender or race, and see only fellow human beings.
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Saturday, November 22, 2014
Test for promoting gender equality harder than it looks
With video games are already rated for violence, Sweden is looking at taking the next logical step: rating them for sexism.
That country’s gaming industry trade organisation, Dataspelsbranchen, has received a government grant to study how this could be done. Basically, they want to let consumers know ahead of time whether a game they’re thinking of buying promotes gender equality.
One method for doing this would be to apply the Bechdel Test — there has to be at least two female characters with names, and there has to be a scene where they talk to each other about something other than men.
At first, I thought the bar was being set low, especially when my son assured by that the 10-year-old Half-Life 2 does indeed have female characters with names who work together to solve major problems. And he showed me a scene where this does happen.
But then I started applying the test to forms of entertainment that I’m more familiar with. TV and books, for example.
I’ve been binge watching Star Trek The Next Generation on Netflix in the hope of finding an episode that I haven’t seen before. So while viewing an episode where the story centres on the doctor, a female named Beverly Crusher, falling in love with an alien, I kept the Bechdel Test in mind. As it turns out, there are two scenes where she and another female character, a counsellor named Deanna Troi, have long conversations. Unfortunately, they talk almost exclusively about men.
OK, so that show was considered progressive for the time it was made, in the 1980s. Surely we’ve made progress in the intervening 30 years. How about a series that’s being made right now?
I’ve worked in a few newsrooms, and found my female colleagues to be generally feisty and independent, so I figured applying the Bechdel Test to a TV show called The Newsroom would be a cinch.
I watched the latest episode, featuring several strong female characters, going through trials and tribulations associated with the news industry. And while they do all have names, and they do all exhibit fortitude and resilience, not once was there a scene where two or more of them were alone having a conversation.
Could it be that Aaron Sorkin simply can’t imagine what women would talk about if they were by themselves?
So how about books? Authors don’t have to hire actors, so they can create any kind of characters they want.
I’m just about finished reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, which was published in 2005. As it turns out, the main character is a 32-year-old woman. But 90 per cent of the rest of the characters are men. The few female characters seldom talk to each other about anything of substance. The closest thing to any kind of depth is in an email exchange with a female friend, but it’s about — you guessed it — a former boyfriend. She has memories of exchanges with a female psychologist, but those centre on her relationship with her father.
Now that I’m aware of this test, I’m seeing entertainment in a whole new light. Our society has come a long way in accepting, and even celebrating, diversity. But we still have many challenges ahead of us.
Image: Beverly Crusher and her alien amour (from Wikipedia).
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Saturday, August 24, 2013
Three great word games for wordsmiths
Whether we’re creating the news or consuming it, we all have one thing in common: words. And, I would venture to say, a love of words.
That’s why one of the best ways of taking a break from the news is by playing a game that involves words. The three I like best are SpellTower, W.E.L.D.E.R. and Letterpress. The first two are available for iOS and Android. Letterpress is iOS only, but there are Android imitators that appear to be similar.
SpellTower: Think of this game as a cross between word-finder puzzles and Tetris. There are a number of different modes of play, but they all involve finding words in a grid of letters. You can connect the letters in any direction and the words can be as short as three letters. In Tower mode, the letters disappear as they are used and the others tumble into their place. Eventually you run out of letters that will make words, and you get your score. It’s a relaxing experience. If you want to get the adrenalin flowing, there is Puzzle mode. In this case, a row of letters drops every time you make a word, so you’re under pressure to make sure the letters in the grid don’t reach the top. Things really get hairy in Rush mode where the rows keep falling regardless of whether you’re making words. The game has a multiplayer option, where players — each on their own device — go all-out in a Rush mode battle. I haven’t tried this, but it could be a good way to blow off some steam.
W.E.L.D.E.R.: Once again, you’re presented with a grid of letters to make words from. In some ways, it’s more restrictive because the words have to be at least four letters long and they have to read top to bottom or left to right. To create the words, you swap adjacent letters. You’re only allowed so many swaps to get to a pre-determined number of words in each level. There are a few tricks you can use, such as reversing groups of letters, but you can only use these special moves a few times in each level. Of course, the levels get progressively harder and you may find yourself forced to trade in “gigawatts” to gain enough swaps to stay alive. You build up gigawatts as you’re rewarded for good playing, but even so you can eventually run out. And this is where to game may lose its appeal. To get more gigawatts you have to pay for them, which makes me a little suspicious of whether the game is truly winnable or made just hard enough that you’re forced to pay to carry on. So far I haven’t had to do this, but be warned.
Letterpress: There is only one way to play this game — and that’s against a friend . . . or random stranger. So if you’re a loner (and hey, some of us are), this one is not for you. Again there is grid of letters, but you can tap letters anywhere in any sequence to form a word. Tap Submit and the letter-tiles flip to your colour. Then it’s your opponent’s turn. You get a point for each tile. The thing is, though, that the game not just about making words — it’s about defending territory. When you surround a tile it becomes defended, and your opponent can’t use it. This aspect leads to all kinds of strategies becoming available, some which are chess-like in their complexity. It’s best, then, to find a friend who plays at about the same level or you might find yourself embarrassed.
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Saturday, July 9, 2011
Here's to vino with the violins
Suds with the symphony might sound like a good idea, but it would be embarrassing if things got out of hand — just ask the Kamloops Multicultural Society.
The Western Canada Theatre is seeking a liquor licence, but if they get one, the police could be keeping a close eye on them. After all, the Canada Day beer garden — run by the society — got shut down when the liquor flowed a little too freely.
On the other hand, the Kamloops Convention Centre already allows a glass of wine with concerts. I attended one and saw a lot of happy people but no rowdies.
It’s hard to believe a bit of tippling with the timpani solo will cause any trouble. But some of the ruffians who show up to see the Arrogant Worms might by need watching.
Cheers.
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