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.

Bridge demolition on Virginia’s Department of Transportation’s YouTube page:

Bridge demolition on Washington’s Department of Transportation’s YouTube page:

You win this time, Virginia!

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

An animatronic dog in a spacesuit playing Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Otherside”:

(Courtesy of ProgramBlue.com, via Fark)

I like Will Smith. Not necessarily because I think he’s a great actor, but because he has a knack for picking good movies to act in. His worst, I, Robot, was still very watchable and entertaining, assuming you’re not one of those “it’s not like the novel!” geeks.

But his new movie, Hancock, is asking for trouble. It’s a comedy movie with a superhero, or a superhero comedy… and in the entire history of films I’ve been exposed to, I’ve never seen a half-decent superhero comedy. With one exception.

Let’s review. Does anybody remember My Super Ex-Girlfriend? No? Not surprising, since it has a Rotten Tomatos rating of only 41%, and was in and out of theaters faster than you could blink.

(I have to admit, I haven’t seen this movie. The previews looked terrible enough to scare me away. All I really know about it is that it stole the “wielding a shark as a melee weapon” from an issue of Flare:)

Disney got into the action with their film about superheros attending a special superhero high school where they learned to control their powers named Sky High. Kurt Russel and a relatively-sizeable role by Bruce Campbell couldn’t save this turkey. I think it’s safe to say I’ve never seen a more formulaic and cliche-ridden movie in my life, although I was impressed by the lengths it went to defeat its own premise in the final ten minutes. (Premise, stated dozens of times: even the sidekicks can contribute and fight crime. Climax of movie: former sidekick can only save school by becoming a full-powered hero. Hypocrites.) Rotten Tomatos, surprisingly, gives this one 73%, and I have no idea why.

Next in line, we have the horrible The Meteor Man. This movie stars Robert Townsend as an urban do-gooder who gains superpowers. I actually don’t remember a lot about this movie either, other than he had the power to learn any ability by touching a book about it, which led to a “hilarious” sequence in a library where he and his similarly-powered counterpart constantly changed tactics as they touched different books on the ground. Rotten Tomatos gives The Meteor Man a dismal 25%.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Will Smith? Be careful out there, ok? This could be the first real stinker of your career, and I don’t want to see that happen.

(Oh, the good movie? I think Mystery Men is hilarious. But a lot of people disagree with me.)

I don’t make it a habit to post YouTube videos on this blog, but I just had to point this one out because I think it’s about the most perfect YouTube video I’ve seen. It’s short and to the point, in focus and in the correct aspect ratio, it tells the message in a way everyone will understand. This actually gives you some hope that the ‘user-created content’ craze can actually create good content.

But most importantly, Charley is damned cute. And it seems to me that having a cat with really poor motor skills would be many times more fun than having a normal cat.