3 posts tagged “entertainment”
The seventh season of "American Idol" premieres tonight. Will you be watching, or are you over it?
I would rather eat dinosaur feces. Seriously, every time that show comes back for another year, the terrorists win.
God, I need a drink.
Film & TV writers are on strike, which means everything except reality TV could halt production. Do you support the strike? Are any of your favorite shows in jeopardy?
I absolutely support the strike. Not least because my father's family included two steelworkers and three schoolteachers. I don't cross picket lines, period.
Moreover, though, the writers are doing a great thing: they're calling bullshit on the media companies. Out of one side of their mouths, the studios say that new media is an unproven thing, that they're going to have to study it and see how things go and oh, they can't afford to actually pay anyone in the meantime because it's not a revenue stream, it's all "promotional." And on the other hand, they're showing full episodes of shows online complete with commercials, which sounds an awful lot like, I don't know, broadcasting... and oh yeah, I think Apple disputes whether anybody's making money on digital media, to the tune of several million dollars a quarter. If nobody's making money on this, I want my cash back for all those episodes of V.
Big Media want to screw you, boys and girls. They want a nickel every time you hum a tune, or watch a snippet of video, all the time, forever - but they only want to pay for it themselves once. And the WGA is throwing down the gauntlet and crying out, "BULLSHIT." This is what unions do: they take a bunch of people who individually have little power, combine it, and fight back. I think we've forgotten that in this country far too often.
And I can live without Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica for as long as it takes Ronald D. Moore to throw down NBC Universal, stomp on its neck, and take the head. Believe that.
"Halo 3" was released this week - did you get a copy? What are your early thoughts on this final installment of the blockbuster trilogy?
Never played it. I think it was a great opportunity that went wildly awry - when Microsoft bought Bungie for the express purpose of making Halo the centerpiece of the XBox, they basically killed the prospects for Halo as a desktop computer game. It took 3 years longer to get to the Mac than it originally would have (it was designed as a Mac-first title before the XBox arrived) and now it's exclusive to arguably the least successful of the big 3 gaming consoles.
I'm sure it's fine for what it is, but the entire genre of 1st-person shooters is so played out I can't imagine it brings anything to the table beyond what we had in the days of Quake 3. The fact that the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 are both having their lunch eaten by the Wii should tell you that the gaming industry is headed in a different direction, and Microsoft (as always) will be the last to figure it out.
