Why has no-one filmed...?
It hit me today while waiting to watch Dune tonight and while reading a GQ article on the filming of The Wheel of Time and being reminded that Tolkien's Second Age is also coming to Amazon, it's time to re-up the discussion on what sci-fi/fantasy series are out there waiting to be turned into cinematic or streaming hits.
The Chronicles of Amber - I've long thought that Roger Zelazny's Amber series would be perfect for a movie or series treatment. I would do the first series, based on Corwin, as a movie trilogy and then do the same for the second series, based on Corwin's son, if the first was successful. The right are apparently held by Disney/ABC, but I've heard nothing of any development. The first series is heavy on family intrigue, power politics, sword and sorcery - Game of Thrones material. The second ventures more into cyber-thriller territory. As I recall, they both feature some strong female characters that could be updated.
The Belgariad - A Science Fiction Book Club discovery for me, not long after they came out. And I read the subsequent series and one-offs as they were released. Best-sellers, even if some people wrote them off as Tolkien-light. Polgara is one of my favorite literary figures. Yes, it's another literal hero's journey (as are LOTR and Wheel of Time) - lots of walking and riding from place to place, but that lends itself to cool scenery and world-building.
Saga of Pliocene Exile/Galactic Milieu - Julian May's series is another that I jumped into about half-way through its publication history. It takes place both in a near-ish future as well as six million years in the past and would make one hell of an extended prestige TV series, with lots of opportunities for fabulous sets/costuming and some pretty cool CGI work.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - NOPE. Nopitty-nope-nope-not-on-a-bet.
According to Wikipedia, classicist Nick Lowe (not the singer) suggested "a way to derive pleasure from Stephen Donaldson books. (Needless to say, it doesn't involve reading them.)" This proposal involved a game he called "Clench Racing", wherein players each open a volume of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
to a random page; the winner is the first to find the word "clench".
Lowe describes it as a "fast" game – "sixty seconds is unusually drawn
out"
So what would you guys like to see on the screen?
Labels: Books, Movies, TV
Cord-cutting Update
A little geeky, maybe, but here's the latest status on our cord-cutting adventure.
Our previous setup was Earthlink DSL and Time Warner Cable, with coax directly into the bedroom TV (so we only got the lower tier of channels) and coax in the media room split between a TWC-provided digital receiver for the full slate of channels and a home theater PC I built a few years ago, that I used as a DVR for the lower tier of channels).
With a change in my work situation last May, we decided to do what we'd been discussing for some time and get rid of our TWC service. Living in Chapel Hill, my biggest concern with over-the-air delivery was the distance to the towers servicing the Research Triangle market (most of which are located SE of Raleigh) and to the Triad (most of which I think are down around High Point) - we split the middle and aren't particularly close to either market. Previous purchases of interior digital antenna were definitely unsatisfactory and exterior antenna looked like a huge hassle. However, Jeannette and I independently hit on an antenna that does work for us - the Mohu Leaf.
Our current set-up in the bedroom is simple - TV attached to a Mohu Leaf 50 powered antenna that is in the bedroom bay window facing pretty much East. We get decent reception of some Triangle and some Triad stations - enough that all the major networks are covered from one or the other market (except maybe NBC but who the hell watches NBC?). Plus we get the UNC stations of course. We absolutely get some pixelation and picture freezes from time to time (often weather-dependent) but overall it's a pretty acceptable experience. We also have a Google Chromecast device on the bedroom TV which allows streaming of Netflix, Youtube, HuluPlus and anything in a Chrome browser.
The media room TV setup is a bit more complicated. I mentioned the home-theater PC that I was running cable through (no cablecard, so I was only getting the lower tier of TWC channels through it). That HTPC remains as part of the setup. Adding a second Mohu Leaf 50 however was unsatisfactory. We've never been able to find an antenna position in the media room that brought in more than a couple of channels clearly. So we've added another component - an HDHomeRun Extend, which is basically a router-sized box with Ethernet connectivity and two TV tuners. It sits upstairs in my home office attached via Ethernet to our wireless access point and via coax to the second Mohu Leaf, this one in my office window facing SW. So TV watching in the media room is through Windows Media Center on the HTPC accessing the HD Homerun tuners via the home network. The HD Homerun unit also gives us the capability to watch over-the-air TV on pretty much any of our networked devices (PCs, tablets, etc).
So OTA is taken care of with the two Mohu Leaf antennae and streaming via the HTPC in the media room, the Googlecast unit in the bedroom and subscriptions to HuluPlus, Netflix and Amazon Prime. That certainly doesn't get us everything we used to have with cable, but Sling TV will get us closer when it is available next month. The HTPC gives us DVR capability as well.
With the various subscriptions (including the Sling TV that we'll add when available), we've dropped a $106/month cable bill in favor of about $42/month in subscriptions (we were already paying for Netflix so I'm not counting it). Overall equipment costs for stuff we didn't already have was about $250 for the two Mohu Leaf antennae and the HD Homerun Extend (look around for deals) - depreciate those purchases over a year and you can add another $20/month to the total for year 1. Still substantially below the monthly cable bill.
So how does this new arrangement stack up? For broadcast networks, it is mostly better. We're getting uncompressed HD signals (unlike TWC) so the picture is typically better. We do get pixelation and the occasional screen freeze but frankly we did on TWC as well. Most will let you stream the latest handful of episodes for free within a day or two of broadcast as well and I can usually get full HD with fewer glitches than either our old cable or the over-the-air setup. There are a lot of cable shows that are available for streaming but that has been hit-or-miss. No longer having Syfy, we managed to stream all of the last season of Defiance, but for some reason the Syfy website dropped about 5 episodes of Haven all at once so we missed most of the latest season of it. Covert Affairs is just not available for streaming anywhere without either a cable/satellite provider or paying via Amazon or iTunes. On the other hand, I've missed a large number of Doctor Who episodes since the relaunch so we're making our way through the Eccleston season and will soon get started on the Tennant years. Sling TV will get us ESPN, TNT and some other networks back that we've missed, but Jeannette still really misses her Turner Classic Movies (ok, I do too) and I do miss Syfy and USA. But frankly those three channels are probably all I'm missing from a full cable subscription that I would actually watch with any frequency.
I think once we've gotten Sling TV (please before the end of the college basketball season please?), we'll be in good shape to last the two or three years it will take before Google Fiber is available in our neighborhood.
Labels: Tech, TV
I Hate Time-Warner Cable - Reason 417
We have an older HD digital set-top box from TWC that does not have an HDMI out interface. This wasn't a problem with our old TV, as it only had two HDMI interfaces available and I was using them for the Blu-ray player and the home theater computer. With the new TV, I've got 4 HDMI ports, so I'd like to swap out the set-top box for a new one with an HDMI interface. Given the limited hours the local TWC office is open, I thought I'd call first to make sure they have one available. Um, yeah, about that...
No phone number is listed on the TWC website for the local office. There's only a toll-free number. So I called it and stumbled through a voice menu that didn't have any options that really matched what I needed. Tech support? Not really, I know what I need and can swap out the box myself. Service upgrade? Not really - same service, just need a box with a different interface.
So I tried service upgrade anyway and got a nice young woman on the phone. I explained what it was that I wanted. "So you want digital service?" No, I have digital service - I just want to swap my cable box out for one that has an HDMI interface. "Ok, you can do that at the local storefront." Yes, but I'd like to talk to them and make sure that they have one available before I disconnect my box and carry it over there during their limited hours of operation. But they don't seem to have a freaking phone! "I'm sorry, sir, they operate as a walk-in service. I can pull up your account and go over your service with you." Jeez, lady, I'm perfectly capable of pulling up my account online - I can read you the goddamn MAC address of the box that I have at home off of your website that I managed to log into all by myself but you can't tell me the freaking telephone number of the local office?
Un-fucking-believable. If it weren't for Carolina basketball I'd drop that shit in a heartbeat.
Labels: Tech, TV
New Toy - HTPC
Spent a good bit of Sunday afternoon hooking up a new home theater PC - so far, so good. Specs are as follows:- HP Pavilion Slimline s3750t PC- Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1 (64-bit)- Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo processor E7500 [2.93GHz]- 4GB DDR2-800MHz SDRAM [2x2048]- 640GB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive- 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4350 & TV Tuner [DVI, HDMI, VGA adapter]- Blu-ray player & Lightscribe SuperMulti DVD burner- Wireless-G LAN card- 15-in-1 memory card reader, 2 USB, headphone port- Integrated 5.1 channel sound with front audio ports- HP wireless keyboard and HP wireless optical mouseAn 802.11N card would of course have been preferable but it wasn't an option with this build. The first steps after initial boot were to install Avast! A/V, ZoneAlarm firewall, Irfanview, Winamp, Deepburner and MediaMonkey. Since we're not planning to use this box for general web-surfing, I may not bother with FireFox or another browser but I will want to go ahead and upgrade to IE8 soon. The wireless access point is upstairs in my home office and so far I seem to be getting adequate throughput for Hulu, although Youtube is stopping to buffer a bit. The Iron Man Blu-Ray is working fine with the software provided from H-P but I fully expect to run into disks that won't play so any suggestions on the best Blu-Ray player software would be most appreciated. I've got my MP3 collection on the workstation in the office upstairs shared out to the new box with high-def audio out to the home theater receiver, so we have tuneage. And I've tested out both analog and digital stations from a straight coax cable TV feed from the wall and that looks good as well - haven't tried recording or any other DVR functions yet. I also haven't checked to see what I can get (if anything) coming through the digital cable box - I'll keep you posted as I continue to set things up. There are a bunch of little things I haven't done yet, like setting up the remote control, rewiring other parts of the HT set-up as I've swapped around a couple of other components, etc. The goal is to make this as complete a system as possible while making it relatively straightforward to use.So my checklist to date is:o Blu-Ray player - check (need to try more disks)o Music Jukebox - checko Internet streaming TV - check (loves me some Hulu!!)o DVR - in progress (tried recording "Big Bang Theory" and "How I Met Your Mother" tonight)
Labels: Movies, Music, Tech, TV
After the Final Season
For the last couple of years, I've been enjoying Joss Whedon's comic book follow-ons to the final seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel - Buffy Season Eight and Angel: After the Fall. Now comes a new one - Boom! Studios has released the first of the Farscape mini-series. The first issue begins where Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars ends, with Crichton and Aeryn Sun holding up their newborn as they look out at the cosmos. I was an occasional viewer of Farscape, always enjoying it when I saw it but never scheduling my life around it (unlike the Whedon shows), but I was a fan enough that I'm happy to see the storyline carried on. It looks like they're doing some number of 4-issue mini-series - no word on how many. Check it out!Labels: Comic Books, TV
"See the Happy Narwhale!"
I got a real happy a couple of weeks ago - was walking through Target when I noticed that Freakazoid! Season One is finally out on DVD - yay!! I always kinda liked the Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain but Freakazoid! was my fave - what's not to like about a teenage geek that gets zapped by a computer bug and gets turned into a superpowered, hyperactive lunatic with a rabid dog called "Foamy" that constantly bites him in the butt as a sidekick?
Labels: TV
Good Stuff
First of all, the White Stripes new CD "Icky Thump". Go buy it. Now. I'll wait.
Hmm-hm-hm.
La-la-la-laaaa.
/* toe tapping */
Got it?
Man, isn't that great! From the Nudie suits on the cover and the Led Zeppelin stomp of the title cut through the whole damn disk, there's not a weak cut on the whole dang thing. Frickin' awesome. And if you didn't think of Graham Chapman saying "Eeee! Ecky thump!" into a microphone when you saw that title, you clearly ain't hanging around the same people I am...
Second, "Psych" is back on the air with a new season. The funniest show on television that doesn't have either Jason Lee or Steve Carell as the lead. The opening ep with Tim Curry and Gina Gershon was one of the funniest things I've ever seen - who knew Gina Gershon could do comedy?
While we're talking about the USA Network, my favorite really new thing is "Burn Notice". Jeffrey Donovan is pretty good but the supporting characters (Bruce "Ash" Campbell, Sharon Gless and
Gabrielle Anwar) are what make the show. Check it out! Oh, and Bruce frickin' Campbell!!
Finally, we saw the latest Harry Potter movie last night and it's good! It's not Alfonso Cuaron Azkaban good, but it's good! It's nice to see the kids actually learning to act and Imelda Staunton's interpretation of Umbridge is spot on. I have my quibbles with it but overall it was a very good addition to the series - we'll need to see it again before it's gone.
Labels: Movies, Music, TV
I'm Living on the Air in Cincinnati...
...Cincinnati WKRP.
For years, WKRP in Cincinnati has been one of the most requested shows to go to DVD. The holdup has been licensing of the music from the shows. If you watched any of the episodes in syndication, you remember that scenes were cut and lots of the music was replaced by what was effectively the same kind of elevator music that Travis showed up to change.
There's finally a DVD set for season 1. There are still licensing issues with lots of the music and a couple of the episodes are the cut syndicated ones (the originals were not available) but they ain't bad. I know the WKRP purists are totally unhappy and swear they'll refuse to buy the DVDs, but after much thought I decided I'm a fan, not a purist, and I've missed the damn show! So far we've watched the 2-part pilot (including Lex's favorite line from Johnny Fever after the station is invaded by aging protesters - "I think you should know that I've killed a lot of old people!"), Les on a Ledge and the Hoodlum Rock episodes. Flying Turkeys is coming up soon!
Somehow those same licensing problems apparently were overcome by whoever is putting out the Saturday Night Live DVDs because the 1st season in its entirety (including all music performances AND the Muppets, which I thought was another licensing problem) is now available. Haven't bought it yet but you know I will - I remember watching the original episode with George Carlin as it aired and I was never the same afterwards.
Labels: TV
TV Advice Needed
We're exploring the possibility of acquiring an HDTV (42"-46") and I would appreciate it if any of you guys have any experience (positive or negative) with LCD, plasma or DLP sets. Because we're not really considering hanging it on the wall and cost is a factor, we're leaning towards DLP - any thought?
Labels: TV
Wesley Crushes Star Trek: TNG
Via JustIsengard, Wil "Wesley Crusher" Wheaton is writing some funny-as-shit episode synopses of Star Trek: The Next Generation at TVSquad.com including this opening paragraph to a hysterical synopsis of "Justice":
Picard sends an away team down to the surface to find out if it's a good place for some shore leave, and they return with some very good news: it's clean, it's beautiful, it's populated with friendly humanoids . . . and they really like to do the nasty.
"At the drop of a hat," according to Geordi.
"Any hat," Tasha says, knowingly.
Read at your own risk (a clear plastic dropcloth over your monitor and keyboard might be appropriate).Labels: TV