No Zytrons In Range

Another in my series of “comments I was going to post to a specific website, but I’m too lazy to make a new account at said website.”

Today I discovered an independently-made television series called Pioneer One based on a tip from the DailyWTF forums. The first episode is on YouTube, although– fair warning– it has awful audio with a continuous buzz throughout the entire episode. They’re funding it using the Kickstarter method, basically asking for donations for each episode, and they’re up to 4 episodes. This whole thing is actually pretty exciting for a number of reasons, but that’s not what I’m writing this blog post about.

Downloading an episode of Pioneer One is a terrible, terrible user experience. Here’s the post I wrote to stick on their comments:

This download experience is awful. Here’s a few problems:

1) End-users don’t know what to do when the video link downloads a .torrent file. You really need to make it clear that bittorrent is required, other than the little tiny banner at the header of the page, and the unreadable grey-on-grey banner on the top right. I’m sure you get kickbacks from them, but it doesn’t help that bittorrent also tries to install spyware… seriously, it’s 2011! So in addition to this site’s bad user experience, you also suffer from Bittorrent’s own bad user experience.

2) Even knowing it’s a bittorrent doesn’t help, since bittorrent downloads on my connection are about 5 times slower than normal downloads. Uploading and downloading at the same time kills my connection. Since you don’t have any normal downloads available, I’m going to have to wait hours for the three episodes I’m downloading. Amazon S3 costs… about as close to nothing as you can get. Please sign up for it and offer alternate downloads from it.

3) End-users don’t know (and shouldn’t care about) the difference between xvid, theora, and matroska. Fuck, I’m a geek, and I don’t even know or care. Just pick the absolute most popular video format (I presume .mp4, everything plays that from Xbox to iTunes to VLC to Zune) and offer the HD or SD download in it. Then add a note saying “if you have trouble playing, use [program you know works]” in case you encounter the one person in the world who doesn’t have a .mp4 playing program.

4) But seriously, just put a Flash movie player on the page. Again, it’s 2011. There are a dozen Flash video sites that will host this for you, and episode 1 is already on YouTube (albeit with awful audio, and unlisted so you can’t search for it.) Instant gratification is good.

I saw the first episode on YouTube. I came here to download the rest, because of the YouTube audio thing. It was way harder than it had to be.

I’m not surprised that any product made by a person who knows what “Theora” is has poor usability; at this point, poor usability is expected from open source fans. What I’m really surprised about is that it applies even when the product is a TV show and not a piece of software.

Usability is important. Seriously. Fix your website.

When I was a kid, our family lived in a house that was right next to an electric fence. Since you’ve likely never lived next to an electric fence in the world before cable, let me just explain: it completely destroys your TV reception. So your choices are either to order cable, or give up on TV altogether. Obviously no red-blooded American would give up on TV, so our family was one of the absolute first to get cable.

Back when Nickelodeon was brand-new, they didn’t have a lot of their own programming, so they’d fill most of their airtime with foreign cartoons that were completely unlike anything on American TV:

• The World of David the Gnome which looks like a cute happy kiddy show, but actually has a decent amount of action and (kid-friendly) violence (against trolls) and ends with the main characters dying. Seriously.
• The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a French-Japanese co-production, which had a 39-episode plot arc and ended up with strange mutants trying to take over the world with a flying Olmec statue head, defeated only by a golden, solar-powered, condor-shaped airplane much footage of which is in this badass techno music video. Seriously these cartoons rocked. This series is available on Netflix.
• Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea

Spartakus was by far my favorite, and it’s really hard to explain, because the show is so surprisingly complex. It’s a French cartoon. The premise is, basically, that while two kids are out camping with their family, they paddle their canoe into a cave and fall into a fantasy world that lives beneath the Earth’s crust. That world consists of “stratas” (basically, huge floating continents), and the center-most strata has the titular “sun beneath the sea” (called Tehra, artificially created by the Arkadians eons ago). The Tehra is dying, and nobody knows why, so in violation of the law some Arkadian children enter the archives to research the problem, which is where they find Tehrig, and Bic and Bac.

Tehrig had a huge influence on me as a kid. He’s basically a giant trilobite-shaped sentient hovercraft/computer, which the cast uses to travel between the strata. He looks like this:

(He also has dozens of little helper robots called Triggies:

If you’ve seen Farscape, now you know where they got the idea for the DRDs. And possibly Moya as well. But I digress.)

I won’t spend the rest of this post gushing over the cartoon, which frankly was poorly-animated and poorly-dubbed. But for a little kid with very little exposure to sci-fi concepts, this thing was mind-blowing.

But pangolins, yes. So the comic relief characters are a pair of immortal identical twin creatures who can start fires by rubbing their noses together named Bic and Bac. It sounds stupid, but they’re awesome. They also have their own little music video in the series, although unfortunately it’s always cut-off in the English dub:

(Link in case embedding breaks.)

If you read the show description or fan sites, you’ll soon learn that Bic and Bac are described as pangolins. What the hell is a pangolin? This is a pangolin:

Pangolins are awesome. They’re basically anteaters, covered in scales, and when in danger they can roll into a ball. (Which Bic and Bac did as well, by the way.) According to their Wikipedia page, someone once made a coat of armor out of pangolin scales, which strikes me as insane. They’re also somewhat endangered, because crazy Chinese people think you can use pangolin scales to reduce swelling.

So, yeah… that’s pretty much all there is too it. I was nostalgia-ing out one day, and came across a couple fan sites for this show I watched as a tiny tot. I read the description of the characters, and came across the pangolin. A basass-looking animal with a goofy-name.

Ok, Star Trek pretty much rocked. I have to say this first, because the way my brain works, I always focus on the negatives first and forget about the positives. So here’s the negatives:

• The camera work was a little problematic at times. It’s like they used some special lens to emphasize lens flares in some attempt at “realism.” There are scenes with huge lens flare rectangles right above the actor’s faces. Also, there were a couple fight scenes where the cuts were so quick you couldn’t tell what was happening in the fight. Editors: we know quick cuts indicate action, but if you make to too quick nobody can tell what the hell is going on!
• While they did a pretty good job of following the Star Trek canon, I’m pretty sure that the Federation didn’t build the Enterprise in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. That was just weird. (Also, what were those super-tall Iowan buildings? Was that a future-city, or was it just the biggest grain elevator ever?) Oh and the Enterprise is at least twice the size of the old one… the original had room for maybe 2-3 shuttles in its landing bay, this new one has like 16. I guess this movie si a “reset’ so it’s not that big a deal. They also changed Star Trek’s warp drive to work more like Battlestar Galactica’s jump drive.
• That scene you saw in the preview where the classic car is racing along the Iowan freeway, then falls off a cliff while Kirk holds on for dear life? That actually has nothing to do with the plot. At all. Not even slightly. It is, believe it or not, part of a product placement for Nokia.
• Apparently all Federation ships now include vast engineering areas that resemble, more than anything, cheese processing plants. I’m actually ok with this, given the larger size of the Enterprise it almost makes sense– except for one small point: since there are no computers or really controls of any type (just pipes and tanks), Scotty’s engineering shots just consist of him running alongside pipes.
• Just say no to cute little comic relief sidekick alien characters. They suck. There’s one in this movie, accompanying Scotty. Just try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

That all said, the movie is vastly more entertaining than I expected it to be. Chris Pine did a great job of playing Kirk, without copying William Shatner’s un-copy-able Kirk. Zachary Quinto, as well, made an excellent Spock, and was much better than I expected. (I guess the crappiness of Heroes was firmly rooted in the script, not in the acting.)

All of the classic bridge characters are there, and all of them have their particular quirks/talents re-inforced: Chekov’s accent, Sulu’s fencing, that weird antenna thing in Uhuru’s ear, Scotty and McCoy’s classic lines. Captain Pike is there, playing the same role as Kirk’s mentor. Even the Kobayashi Maru test is present, and Kirk’s “cheating” is shown in a particularly comical way.

In fact, I was surprised at the amount of humor in the film. Even the villain is given a humorous line at one point, that made the whole theater laugh. It’s really at the level of, say, Star Trek IV, almost sliding into the comedy genre.

My recommendation: Watch it.

I won’t gush on and on about what a genius, mind-bending, ahead-of-its-time series Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner” was. It’s available on the web, please watch it if you haven’t before, it’s truly amazing and deserves your attention.

Patrick McGoohan’s death is a tremendous loss. Be seeing you, Number Six.

Recently in World of Warcraft, I managed to complete the quest and get my level 70 druid Sacora to the Ogri’la faction area. (I know; I’m slow. Leave me alone.) One of the daily quests in this area is named “The Relic’s Emanation.” To complete it, you must kill a guard or two, then feed a crystal into a machine and play a mini-game. Once you’ve reached level 7 of the mini-game, you gain the Apexis Emanation and the quest is complete.

The mini-game is Simon.

That’s right; you have four colored tiles that are triggered in sequence and you must repeat back the sequence. They are Red, Blue, Yellow and Green and each one plays a unique musical tone. Simon. The loveable game everyone had in the 80s:

So I put down WOW and pick up a new game I just bought: Bioshock. Working through the tutorial level, I get to the part about hacking turrets, security robots, and cameras. To successfully hack a machine, you must complete a mini-game. Guess which one?

Pipe dream.

That’s right. The quintessential pipe-clearing game I played in 1990 on my green-screened Gameboy, that’s the mini-game you have to complete. Pipe Dream:

What’s the deal? Has the world run out of games? Or is Blizzard and 2K not very creative? And did they really think that people wouldn’t remember Simon or Pipe Dream?

One of the few shows I watch every week is Lost. It kind of sucks this season, but I already have the season pass in iTunes so I watch every episode if only so I’m not wasting money. The most current episode “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead” had about the worst case of manufactured suspense I’ve ever seen in a show.

Manufactured Suspense is the term I use to describe an event in a TV show or movie that attempts to be suspenseful but, well, isn’t. You can tell it’s supposed to be suspenseful from the music, acting and editing, but if you spend more than a few seconds thinking about it, you soon realize that there’s nothing really happening.

Last week’s Lost is about Hurley finding a tipped-over VW van (complete with Dharma Initiative badge) in the jungle, and trying to convince the other castaways to help him fix it and get it running again. Finding that the battery is stone-dead, Hurley decides to get the VW started by pushing it down a hill and popping the clutch. Fair enough. The “danger” is that at the end of the hill is a pile of big rocks, which will smash the car up unless Hurley steers away in time.

But think about this scenario a second. The danger can be easily dodged by steering the van in the other direction, that’s all. Steering the van doesn’t require that the engine be running. So… what difference does it make whether the engine starts or not? None at all.

So Jin and Sawyer push the van down the hill, and complete with dramatic music and editing, it rolls towards the rocks. Needless to say, Hurley doesn’t pop the clutch until he’s almost exactly at the rocks, and of course after the engine starts he steers the van away from danger and saves the day.

To the creators of Lost: I like to think the castaways aren’t so retarded that they believe you can’t steer a car without the engine running. Please stop insulting my intelligence and theirs.