More Serenity?

Sci Fi Wire -- Serenity flies again?

If, so the rumour goes, DVD sales of Joss Whedon's ever-so wonderful Serenity do the business, they might well go make another one.

Thus it becomes everyone's duty to buy at least two copies IMHO.

Can't stop the signal...

Lost

Okay, so Series One has now officially ended in the UK with as big a damp squib as any episodic series has managed to date. Even the Buffys (Buffi?) where the season's Big Bad turned out to be an overgrown snake or an overcharged Frankenstein's Monster didn't quite plumb the depths of pathos Lost managed last night (plus, to be fair to the Whedonverse, Buffy did pull one of the all time greatest cliffhangers out of the pot when the Buffster herself died for our sins).

Nope, that was frankly a bit poor, and you can see why Channel 4 ran eps 22 and 23 together, because nobody would have bothered watching after the pisspoor 22 if ep 23 wasn't rolling up right after the ad break.

Good bits: Hurley's getting on the plane and the incident on The Boat (which was about when I remembered why I like the show in the first place). Bad bits: Shannon has failed to die in spite of my frequent supplications to the gods. Mediocre bits: All the stuff that filled the gaps between Hurley's getting on the plane and the incident on The Boat, to be honest.

Ah well, at least Battlestar Galactica is back.

Work - Stuff afoot in the mobile market

Google and Yahoo step up mobile ambitions | The Register

Good piece from El Reg on the new services Google and Yahoo! are launching for mobiles and their plans for world domination therein.

More virtual chicanery

So, we've recently had virtual porn in a virtual world, with avatars shedding their dermal layer of pixels and letting it all hang out. Next we have a TV broadcast from inside Second Life. Not just any TV programme either, but the BBC's venerable Newsnight with uber-anchor Jeremey Paxman at the helm.

And yes, that is Paxo's avatar dancing on the desk and not some horrible Michael Barrymore hallucination.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Do avatars dream of electric racoons?

thegrauniad adds 10p

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Press&publishing | Guardian cover price to rise

10p extra. Bastards! That means my grauniad habit is costing me an extra £25 a year or thereabouts as from next Monday. The swine! If it wasn't for Steve Bell, I could give it up tomorrow you know...

Use the force for good, Luke

Following the earlier story about in-game yoof marketing, here's the upside: the UN says its free Food Force game has become the second most downloaded game ever in the history of everything, with a whopping 3m downloads.

The moral: if we have to brainwash kiddies, let's at least get some good liberal sensibilities into 'em.

Food Force hits 3m

(Via Wonderland)

HDTV History

One I just stumbled across: a rather trenchant analysis of HDTV efforts written at some point during the Clinton Administration years. Useful if anyone ever needs to know the historical process behind HD.

Okay, so it's a small field...

Lessons from The Cutting Edge: The HDTV Experience

CES stuff

According to the lovely people over at Gizmodo, amongst a veritable plethora of Xbox 360 announcements was that an external HD DVD drive add-on capable of playing HD movies is going to be released for the console sometime this year.

Not only is this a) cool, but seeing as how The Beast of Redmond is planning on flogging around 5m 360s by June this year, b) it's potentially significant too.

Live from CES: Microsoft and the 360 - Gizmodo

The Metaverse Roadmap

Because sometimes putting a link in your blog is the only way of not forgetting information...

Roadmapping: A Collaborative Foresight Tool

This fragfest brought to you by...

Soooo...not content with getting their evil hooks into everyone on the planet, the world's marketing bods are heading into virtual worlds too. Here's some new stuff from Forrester Research:

Two main avenues are open for advertising through games: in-game advertising and advergaming. The former is an extension of the product placement common in movies and television, and can range from graphical representation of a product in a game to wholesale sponsorship of a gaming title...Advergaming refers to a game, usually online, that is wholly intended as a promotional device.

Here's the story on emarketer.com. (via Wonderland)

Jesus up before the beak

CNN.com - Did Jesus exist? Court to decide

Love it. Only in the Italian legal system...

"I started this lawsuit because I wanted to deal the final blow against the Church, the bearer of obscurantism and regression," Cascioli told Reuters.

Cascioli says Righi, and by extension the whole Church, broke two Italian laws. The first is "Abuso di Credulita Popolare" (Abuse of Popular Belief) meant to protect people against being swindled or conned. The second crime, he says, is "Sostituzione di Persona," or impersonation.

Sounds like an open and shut case to me. Over to our Religious Correspondent, Richard Dawkins...

One cup or two?

Lots of sites have carried this kettles causes eco-mayhem story, none of them have written it so entertainingly as Inky Circus.

inkycircus: Climate change caused by ... kettles?

Work - Deep joy, it's the first NAB rumour of the year

The lads and lasses over at ThinkSecret reckon they're onto something Apple-flavoured.

Think Secret - Final Cut 6 to usher in new video editing era for Apple:

"Preliminary information from sources suggests that Apple will take advantage of the April show to demonstrate Final Cut Pro 6 to the public for the first time. Even more significant, Apple will use the stage to unveil Final Cut Extreme, an extremely high-end version of its video editing software designed to grab marketshare away from rival Avid."

DIY press kit time

Quite worried by the Web Economy Bullshit Generator in that I could swear the first three times I spun its random wheels I came up with phrases I'd already come across in press releases last year.

deliver transparent solutions

monetize viral ROI

mesh plug-and-play supply-chains

Not quite up to the standard of my all-time favourite from Drop The Dead Donkey- synergising nowness with excellence - but getting perilously close.

Work - More Citizen Journalism stuff

Caught an interesting doc looking at the whole citizen journalism thang buried in the deep dark depths of the BBC News 24 schedule called Have You Got News For Us.

The Boxing Day Tsunami probably started it all, with all the major footage taken by amateur cameramen. By the time we get to the London Bombings, the BBC was getting 300 pictures and 3000 SMS messages. And, of course, December's Hemel Hempstead oil fire saw over 6500 contributions pour in.

So, now you have agencies like Scoopt which firmly emphasises the ability to make money out newsworthy and celeb pics, charges a whopping 50% and demands three months' exclusivity on everything sent to it. At the other end of the scale, the technology is allowing the likes of Felixstowe TV to set up broadband-based pico-stations, and these semi-pro outfits are often first on the scene of a breaking story.

Issues? Oh yes. Rights and copyright, privacy, danger, ethics...the lot. Broadcasters are going to have to wrestle with all this in '06, not to mention have enough staff deployed to handle the deluge when anything noteworthy occurs in front of the mobile-wielding masses. Plus, of course, the term 'Citizen Journalism' itself could probably do with an overhaul, unless of course the news orgs of the planet really want the rest of us to start interviewing people for reactions and intoning sonorously about 'scenes of terrible devastation' or 'close-knit communities in shock'.

Strewth etc

Google to 'launch own PC' | The Register

Quoth El Reg: Google is planning to provide an own-brand Windows-less PC and sell the low-cost system through a partnership with retail giant Wal-Mart.

Looks like this year's CES is going to be veerrryyy interesting.

Life - The Ideas of '06

Interesting things I read in thegrauniad today, part 2
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Ideas: Emergence, diaspora, the 'imperial consumer': which ideas will shape the coming year?

Some really interesting stuff in here, including Tom Bentley on Amartya Sen's new book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, which promises to be another influential Sen masterpiece.

Naomi Klein's entry was interesting too, especially given the continuing WTO tensions:

It's an old idea that is being reclaimed and retro-fitted for a new economy: worker control. For the past four years, and largely under the media radar, workers in Latin America have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. The wave of takeovers began in Argentina, where some 200 abandoned factories are now run through direct democracy, employing roughly 15,000 workers. It has since spread across the continent, and the past few months have seen the first takeovers in Canada and Spain. In October, the government of Hugo Chavez hosted the first Latin America-wide meeting of "recovered companies" in Venezuela. Six hundred workers from eight countries came together with a simple idea: if the capitalist class can't find a way to make their businesses work, workers deserve to have a go.

Life - Return of the Zombies

Interesting things I read in thegrauniad today, part 1.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Steven Wells: Zombies come back from the dead

Zombies are everywhere, in particular on Showtime in the US:

Homecoming - a made-for-TV movie where Americans killed in Iraq rise from their flag-draped coffins and slaughter their way to the polling booths so they can vote out a warmongering president. When the Republicans then steal the election, the disgusted dead of other wars also rise. The climax of the film sees a GI zombie army storming the White House.

Sounds cool. Rest of it is a short piece about the rise of zombiedom, which can only be classed as A Good Thing. Is that Steven Wells as in the NME's venerable old Seething Wells I wonder?

Life - Donkey Kong

Was it just my imagination, or was King Kong not very good. Too long, too over-indulgent, too flaccid and a bit too much of Weta Digital going Nyaa nyaaa nya nya nyaaaa at ILM. Yes, that whole dancing through the legs of the Brontosauri was stunning vfx work, but it didn't make for good film-making IMNSHO.

Jack Black was surprisingly good, Peter Jackson surprisingly bad. Lop an hour off it though and you might have a good filum.

Misc - Cycling across America

CNN.com - A bicycle built for seeing America - Dec 30, 2005

A nice tale for New Year's Day; a lyrically written piece about cycling from Washington over to the Pacific. Not a journey I'd fancy, about 30 miles is tops for me on a bike, but definitely a good way to see the country. Hell, a good way to see any country; the Campaign for Real/Slow Tourism starts here.

Colorado offers many features not encountered since the East. Among them: coffee chains, suburban sprawl, wide shoulders and Democrats.