My DVR: Network TV

So, if anyone's wondering what kind of TV I watch... I'm doing several posts on the contents of my DVR. So here's the regular-season network TV shows that are on my DVR:

Sunday: Once Upon a Time (ABC), Revenge (ABC). I don't actually watch either of these a lot - I don't have any way to catch up with the first half of season 2 of Once Upon a Time, and Revenge is my roommate's.

Monday: Bones (Fox), The Following (Fox). Long time Bones fan, but the show seems to be getting a bit boring, and The Following is just starting but looks promising.

Tuesday: Body of Proof (ABC). I like medical examiner shows, for some reason.

Wednesday: Arrow (CW), Law & Order: SVU (NBC), Criminal Minds (CBS), Supernatural (CW). Arrow is one of my new favorite shows, which I've blogged about before, and my DVR's priorities are set to record SVU and Criminal Minds if all three of the latter shows are on.

Thursday: The Big Bang Theory (CBS), Glee (Fox), Elementary (CBS). I don't keep up with Big Bang Theory very much, and I don't know why I still watch Glee but I kind of like watching it, and Elementary is another one of my favorites!

Friday: Grimm (NBC). This one is fun if still a bit monster-of-the-week, but the season 2 storyline is picking up quickly, and I still can't even get over the last screen before the (very long) midseason break, which read "To Be Continued... Sorry."

Off-Topic: Hockey. *sigh*

Just in case any of you were wondering "Wow, is all you do with your time watching Teen Wolf and Ancient Aliens and blogging about them?" the answer is "No! I also watch many other TV shows, as well as LA Kings hockey, and CNN is always on in the background. Even when I'm watching Teen Wolf on my laptop.

Currently, the Kings' attempts at playing hockey are what's made me yell at the TV the most lately. I just don't really blog about this because this isn't a sports blog.

It's so depressing. Like, we won the Stanley Cup last spring. It was awesome! I was able to take a subway to downtown LA and watch the Cup be paraded down our street. I stood in line to get Dustin Brown's autograph on one of my Stanley Cup posters for my brother.

And then we were like "Yeah! We get to say we're the defending champions! Yay!" and then the hockey season was locked out, and we were all cursing Bettman's name, and breathed a small sigh of relief when finally the lockout ended and a shortened season was announced.
But then... what is this that they're doing on the ice out there?

New midseason TV!

Now that Fringe is over... OK, I still haven't gotten over Fringe, and there's now an empty Fringe-shaped space in my heart on Friday nights. OK, there haven't been any Friday nights yet, but there will be.

New shows that sound interesting are Continuum (Syfy), Defiance (Syfy), Cult (CW), and The Following (Fox). Then there's Zero Hour (ABC), which looks like it might be compatible with my Ancient Aliens (or Dan Brown or National Treasure) bingo cards.

First of all, the pilots of Cult and Zero Hour won't air for another month or so.

I saw the pilot of The Following last night, and unlike when I saw it at Comic-Con, I saw it from the start. It has Kevin Bacon, making the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon even easier now, and one Shawn Ashmore, the twin brother of Aaron Ashmore who I liked on Warehouse 13 (Oh, hey there's two of them! I can live with that ;-) Plot-wise, it so far seems like there's a non-zero number of characters who will, sooner or later, end up doing stupid things that will result in me yelling at the screen. Oh, and it's about this retired FBI agent who is apparently now consulting (something that retired FBI employees get asked to do both frequently and for good pay, in a rare glimpse of realism on television. It's less realistic that they get paid to consult on catching serial killers). 

Defiance has Jaime Murray from Warehouse 13 (yep, I love that show) and also has a cool-looking MMO. Unfortunately, it does not have a cool-looking MMO that's compatible with Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux. Maybe the little things that are available On Demand will catch me up on what's going on? And there's this really neat website you can mouse around and check out. No, really. Sadly, we'll have to wait for April to see it. (And then it will be back-to-back with Warehouse 13. Yay!)

Also watched the pilot of Continuum, which is apparently Syfy's next entry in its (now) long and storied tradition of just straight-up importing stuff because Canadians are the only people actually making new scifi right now. Future cop winds up chasing down future terrorists in 2012 (really? Did they know they weren't even airing this until 2013?) but this seems like it'll raise a lot of interesting paradoxes about time travel and things, especially considering that Future Cop can't stop a present-day character from seeing glimpses into the future and knowing that they're going to be important and famous.

Slightly spoilery speculation for Continuum behind the cut...

Four Years, Four Months, Nine Days, and 100 Episodes

I don't know how to express my feelings right now, other than to say that this is my very favorite TV show. I grew up loving the original Star Trek series and with an appreciation for all it's spun off, I discovered the amazing and tragically short Firefly, I became part of a exponentially growing fan community of Doctor Who which has endured for fifty years. As wonderful as all of those experiences were, this one still stands out.

It started when I saw posters like this. The premise was something I naturally was interested in, as a long-time X-Files fan, the production team looked promising, and the gorgeous, gorgeous visuals pushed it to "I can not wait to watch this live" status.

It didn't disappoint. There were characters I loved, interesting and original concepts, and super amazing special effects. But we lived in fear of Fox pulling a repeat of Firefly, and moving the show to the Friday Night Death Slot and then cancelling it due to low ratings.

Then, Fox ordered the second half of its first season. It wasn't the most surprising thing in the world, but still not something I had counted on. This first season ended by introducing the other universe.

It was renewed, happily, for a second season. It seemed to have escaped the fate of Firefly. Characters died, and alternate universe versions of all the familiar characters were introduced.

Then it was renewed for a third season. A more overarching plot was coming into view, and more about the characters were revealed. More attention was paid to the tiny, tiny differences between the universes, and the "art piece" episodes were introduced. In the middle of this, our worst fears began to come true: Fox moved it to the Friday Night Death Slot.

Despite this, it was renewed for a fourth season. Due to a plot point, the entire of both universes was changed, creating slightly different versions of the characters in both universes, and the stories became more intense and high-stakes.

As ratings held steady but low, the fans mobilized and created a Twitter campaign in which we made an episode-specific hashtag to get trending during the show's airtime. Then, somehow, what was almost a miracle occurred: Fox began cooperating with the campaign leaders, putting the episode-specific hashtag in the corner of the screen rather than the typical "#Fringe" hashtag. It meant, importantly, that someone at Fox actually wanted to renew the show. As time dragged on, the showrunners even went so far as to film two separate endings to the season depending on which decision the network made.

Then, a mere two weeks before the season four finale, the show was renewed for a final thirteen-episode season. This season was set in a dystopian future, with older versions of some characters, more new characters, and a number of character deaths, along with the impending sense of tragedy when the show finally would end.

In the end, I watched every episode. I bought every DVD season, went to the Comic-Con and Wondercon panels, swapped people at SDCC for the gigantic Fringe backpacks both years I went, got a fedora from that final panel, participated in a (successful!) fan campaign, and made some amazing internet friends.

Ancient Aliens: TIME TRAVEL TIME! And NAZIS!

Half of me just wants to make this entire post a link to Doctor Who on Netflix.

Alright, now that I've got that out of my way....

In the first 30 seconds you mentioned Hitler. Please tell me this isn't going to be about Hitler. Please.

"Could Einstein have accidentally helped the Nazis build a time machine?"Well, I guess it is going to feature Hitler....

I guess this week people watched "Let's Kill Hitler" and the Indiana Jones movies before producing this?

They're talking about Nazis potentially doing stuff in secret as if it's a question. Third Reich scientists carried out clandestine experiments on everything. Even - no, especially - implausible metaphysical type things. Are you seriously failing that badly at history that's only 80 years old?  Oh, and "Super secret Nazi technology?" Thank you for those precise academic terms.

For what is probably the first time, and quite possibly the last, in this show's lifespan, it argues that an ostensible spaceship crash is actually not a spaceship crash. Because it's a Nazi time machine crash.

"...rituals of stargazing, believed to enable time travel." Well, if you take the Wilfred Mott approach, I guess stargazing maybe can help time travel?

Sirius is apparently where these aliens came from, because why else would people in multiple, separate ancient cultures be fascinated by the brightest star in the sky?

Nope, that actually doesn't look like a representation of a spiral galaxy. That is actually a single spiral, and that is a series of concentric circles. *facepalm*

Inaccurate visual of the day: A discussion of neutron spins accompanied by a clip of people in a lab lit solely by green light, pouring something that looks like liquid nitrogen into something else.

Oh, they actually used the word "Stargate". I HAVE WON ANCIENT ALIEN BINGO!

No, they're mentioning the LHC now... even better.

And they just used the word "god particle."

Oooh, and they're talking about aliens like the "Roswell" aliens. And how they look like how some people think humans might look in the future. Once again, some kind of wibbly wobbly timey wimey logic they're using here!

Not really an entire post...

But ran across something from io9 titled "This is what happens when you give fairy tale characters guns on Once Upon A Time" and just had to check it out.

Be warned, this contains spoilers up through the January 13th, 2013 episode!

Books and Movies: City of Bones

So over two years ago, I picked up the City of Bones novel from the library, read it, liked it, and read the sequels, but there were only three books in the series (The Mortal Instruments) at the time.

Yes, a look at the cover makes it look like a cheesy romance novel aimed at teens, and yes, there is an endorsement from Stephenie Meyer on the back.

But, this book has less actual romance than any given chapter from any of the Twilight books and more action that the entire franchise, so it gets points for that. Also, it's got very good pacing - not only is there plenty of action, but what could have been a long, boring "infodump" is broken up into brief segments through the book - but the worldbuilding. Oh my god, the worldbuilding. If there's one thing that will make me fall in love with a series, or at least forgive more major flaws that I would otherwise, it's worldbuilding.

The book is set in New York City, with plenty of references to local geography, and the premise that some run-down or defunct appearing locations in the city were only an illusion to hide places with supernatural elements. And, the supernatural elements are plentiful and interesting for a fantasy book: There are the expected werewolves and vampires, and several other species, but so far every species has an origin that more or less makes sense within the universe. The weapons and magic are also creative, and seem to consistently follow rules.

The plot has a few predictable elements, although mostly from the heroic epic archetype (seriously, if you can't guess who Clary's father is by the end of the first bit history she hears, you must not have read much fantasy at all) but also a couple twists, and the dialogue is very believable for a YA fantasy, so while it's not amazing on the level of Hunger Games, it's definitely better than some more popular YA fantasies and most of what's on the CW right now.

So, back to the point, when a friend and I went to see Breaking Dawn Part 2 (yeah, I know) we saw a trailer for it, and it looked pretty awesome, so I went to re-read the books.

Then, my sister and I were chatting online, and we ended up discussing the beautiful human being that is Aidan Turner (as we often do when we chat online) and we looked at his IMDb page and discovered that he was actually in the City of Bones movie.

Which made us very happy. Then we saw that it had an August release date.

Shit.

In all of three years that I was working at a movie theater during late August, I cannot remember one good movie that was released during that time. Which is kind of discouraging, because really: Lots of interesting visuals, plenty of action scenes, and dialogue that's practically written to be onscreen? It seems like someone would practically have to try to make an adaptation of this that wouldn't be at least marketable and popular with teens in movie terms. One can only hope that the release date was not the studios resigning it to the dumping grounds of mediocre movies, but because someone decided that it was better to release it after the last Twilight movie and after SDCC 2013.

Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see...

And now a few spoilery things!

Ancient Aliens: Bingo Masterlist!

So, I made some bingo cards using the website http://print-bingo.com/ 

Here's an example of one:

How to play:

• [CITATION NEEDED] is the FREE space!
• If a term (except for "Ancients") is in quotation marks on the bingo card, it must be used verbatim on the show or appear onscreen for it to count. 
• You must be able to explain why you've claimed terms that are open to interpretation. "Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey" might be appropriate for time travel, or better yet, for a time when someone uses the resemblance of an ancient cave painting to modern human-invented astronaut suits to "prove" that they are images of aliens.
• "Multiverse The" should be "Multiverse Theory". Oops. Sorry!
• You'll know who "That Guy With The Hair" is quickly enough.
• "Clueless Scientist" and "Clueless Historian" are the scientists and historians who are saying bland, accurate things that contain no mention of aliens at all. Often paired with "Inaccurate visuals!"
• "Conspiracy Theory DENIAL!" is when the show denies one common conspiracy theory to support their conspiracy theory - i.e., denying a UFO crash is a UFO because it's really a Nazi time machine.

CARDS ARE HERE (10 cards per .pdf, 25 .pdf's, so that's 250 cards - you're welcome!)

The masterlist of words is behind the cut, if you'd like to make your own or add or delete something - I'm thinking fewer scientists, and more ancient cultures/religions? I definitely need to add, eventually, "Vikings", "Norse Myths", "Looks Like Modern Tech", and "Chariot(s) of the Gods."

Ancient Aliens: Founding Fathers/Illuminati, Meet The Extraterrestrials.

So this opened with a line that went something like "A stargate, hidden in our nation's capitol dome." And all this time I had thought it was hidden under Cheyenne Mountain!

Apparently, this time the thing that aliens are responsible for is founding the United States of America, although this is really, really stretching the definition of "ancient". It wasn't even 250 years ago!

The first proof of this was that strange lights were seen over the DC area once in the 1950's. These lights were not Soviet spacecraft, because the Soviets, continuing their long history of being perfectly open and honest with us during the 50's, said the lights weren't there.

More proof of this is that Benjamin Franklin met with people regularly to discuss science. Presumably, the aliens were informing him about science, including on what a brilliant idea it was to go kite-flying in thunderstorms.

Of course, at this point they inevitably bring in the topic of freemasonry. Surprisingly, they actually got someone who was an important part of the Freemasons to come on the show and say vague things about the organization. The general pentagram shape of some of the streets in DC was mentioned, but in their Conspiracy Theory Twist of the Week, they held that this was not necessarily something that the Freemasons did purely because it was their symbol, but because it was referring to stars and/or aliens told them to.

[think of the scene in National Treasure where Nic Cage looks at a dollar bill through a water bottle]

Then, we get on to the Washington Monument, which is noted to be the largest obelisk in the world. They give up on the opportunity to snicker at phallic symbolism in favor of saying it's some kind of transmitter. And that the layout of the streets around it also serve to radiate and transmit some kind of space energy through all that concrete and asphalt! I guess sort of like that big ferris wheel in London in the first episode of the new Doctor Who...

Then, the show went into their foray of completely baffling logic for this episode: They said that the reflecting pool meant that the obelisk went down as well as up, doubling its size, power, and/or effectiveness. Even my non-scientist consultant (aka roommate aka Jamie) pointed out that the image of the obelisk in the reflecting pool was really horizontal to the ground.

Then it's important that the Capitol was built on a hill. Because instead of hills being classic places to put things from the beginning of time because it was easy to see and be seen from there, this is somehow related to the Temple Mount in ancient Jerusalem.

Then, this episode closes out with a double dose of the misuse of the word "literally" - the phrases "literally in a vortex of energy"and "Domes are literally considered to be portals or gateways to the stars" are both said in a short period of time.

So, can we blame the current state of Congress on the swirling vortexes of energy from the stars? Or is their problem that they've become too out of touch with the space aliens?

Ancient Aliens: I'm Literally Shouting at the TV Right Now

Oh god. Why do I do this. WHYYYYY.

Right. To motivate myself to pick up a real science textbook.

So far we've got:
The author of Chariots of the Gods - which, as I understand from my archaeology book, was THE book of ridiculous archaeological psuedoscience that was held up as an epitome of everything psuedoscientific - was talking about something. Apparently, the fact that on the equinox, the edge of a shadow from a temple falls on another temple. Because geometry is too hard for humans to have invented on their own. Where does this guy think calculus came from? Does he even know what calculus is?

Someone saying that fire was of mystical significance to ancient cultures that had rituals involving fire, not because fire was, say, necessary to cooking food and surviving the cold, but because fire looked like spaceship exhaust.

Then someone said that the rituals associated with kings wear crowns coming from how aliens might look if their heads were backlit by something, because I guess human heads can't be backlit?

Think that was the flimsiest logic you've ever heard? Well, here's one even better: The proof that a certain ritual by an indigenous tribe in Mesoamerica was inspired by extraterrestrial visitors is that - take a moment to put down and swallow whatever you're eating or drinking, your keyboard will thank me - the outfit worn by the "medicine man" is almost the exact same shape as 20th-century astronaut suits!

[cue some kind of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff here]

Oh, hey, it's the "TARDIS rock art". Although I'd think it's more credible if they actually said out-and-out that it means the Doctor visited them.

"Star beings"? What? Is "extraterrestrial" not mysterious sounding enough any more? Since I'm going on a Doctor Who tangent, is a Star Whale a kind of Star Being?

"Maybe quantum entanglement is already occurring" *cue animation of Aurora Borealis*

Oh. My. Flying. Spaghetti. Monster. They're trying to sell DVD's of this? Does this imply that people actually buy DVD's of this?!? Why would you do that? (I will not take "but drinking games" as an answer because that's what Netflix is for)

Wait, this is almost literally Stargate. They're even talking about the importance of Abydos! I think I would buy the DVD if it actually was a Stargate/Doctor Who crossover.

Yeah, and we're done. Or at least my brain is breaking.

Once Upon a Time: Done with season 1!

AKA, "Why hasn't anyone in this town sit Emma down for a Revenge marathon?"

So, obviously, spoilers throughout!

So what am I doing with this blog?

I don't know. I guess since it's 2 AM, or more precisely past midnight but it feels like 2 AM, or later, my brain is making the kind of decision that brains make when they think it's this inappropriate of an hour and it's come to the conclusion that Twitter, Tumblr, and other such places aren't a sufficient way for me to put every thought that comes through my head out into the universe.

Because I'm jobless and have far too much time to do things and the power of the internet at my fingertips. I feel like I should be, I don't know, writing radical new programs or apps, or cracking into high-security places and exposing corrupt corporations, or something. But instead I'm going to use this to shout at the TV where everyone can hear or something like that.

Oh, yeah, a side effect of being jobless is that I watch a lot of TV. A LOT of TV.

Right now I'm Netflixing my way through Once Upon a Time, Being Human (with live chats with my sister, mostly about how gorgeous Aiden Turner is and how we wish Annie was our BFF and how really really freaking beautiful Aiden Turner is), Star Trek: TNG, and Doctor Who with my roommate.

Then we have, at last count, 30-ish shows on our DVR, which sounds like a lot but some are regular-season shows and some are mid-season shows and some are summer shows and some are British shows that have sporadic periods of five or six or seven new episodes at a time, and our DVR can only record two things at once. Right now, a lot of things are on hiatus, but in the regular season we've been watching Rizzoli & Isles, Arrow, Criminal Minds, SVU, Glee, Project Runway, Elementary, and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

And I'm a mere two episodes away from the thoroughly epic-looking conclusion to my absolute favorite TV show of all time, Fringe. The concept alone interested me, the first promo made me determined to watch the pilot, and here I am, five seasons later, wondering what the hell I'm going to do with my Friday nights now. (Actually, maybe that's why my brain thinks it's 2 AM)

Other things that might happen include various forms of geekery, cooking misadventures, bemoaning my state of unemployment, updates on my cat, the completely surreal experience of living in Los Angeles, various things concerning science, links to cool things I find on the web, extensive excitement about comic conventions and who/what I'm cosplaying, and me complaining that the LA weather still isn't warm enough for about half the year.