Sarah Connor Chronicles

Fox made an uncharacteristic good call when they held onto The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for airing during the strike in January. It’s not a great show, but it has the kind of excitement you look for in a 24. I don’t think it’ll be as good as Alias, but it’s already better than Bionic Woman ever was. But what is up with the name? Try saying “Sarah Connor Chronicles_ five times fast. The sportscaster doing the throw before Sunday’s episode couldn’t even say it once. Terminator: The Series isn’t catchy, but at least it would have been pronounceable.

Directors' Guild and Writers' Guild

Mark Evanier on how the Directors’ Guild talks could affect the writers’ strike.

We the Robots

Today’s We the Robots has a case of the Mondays. And I’m right there with ‘em.

CNN Political Market

CNN has launched a political market website that’s pretty fun to use. Find a market (like “Who will win the Democratic nomination”), and you can buy shares using fake money. They ask a few simple questions that help you narrow down how many shares to buy, and then you can buy or sell based on how the market is doing. Prediction markets like these can be amazingly accurate.

Bonus, the site lets you use an OpenID instead of a password when you create your account, so you can just use your LiveJournal, Vox, AIM, etc. URL and use that password instead of having to create and remember a new one.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Annotations

Thanks to Santa Claus, I’ve now finally read the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and will be starting The Black Dossier tonight. I’ll spare a proper review, which isn’t something of which the internet needs another, and instead link to Jess Nevins’s great annotations. What strikes me most about the series is that they’re entirely enjoyable without an encyclopedic knowledge of Victorian fiction. I’ve read Dracula, The Invisible Man, King Solomon’s Mines, The War of the World, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a number of Sherlock Holmes stories, but none of it is required to follow the story or understand the characters, and one would need to read thousands more pages to pick up on all of the references that Alan Moore has snuck in there. He could have easily made the books very dense given their premise, so I was surprised to find them entirely enjoyable without needing to read panel-by-panel annotations as I went along.

NetNewsWire Now Free

NetNewsWire, the best RSS reader client for the Mac, is now free. I use Google Reader myself, but only because I don’t have the option of using Macs all the time.

Pikmin in Smash Bros. Wii

I’m not too interested in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but I love that Olimar and the Pikmin are going to be in it. Gives me hope that Nintendo hasn’t forgotten about the characters and that a Wii Pikmin 3 will eventually be made.

A Mind Interrupted

Touching story about the most recent issue of Buffy. A cameo spot was given to an essay contest winner whose husband wrote in to say how much the show had helped his wife when she was starting to suffer from schizophrenia.

Naming twins in Python & Perl

Naming twins in Python & Perl

Brand New Day

I’m loathe to admit that the new Spider-Man Brand New Day actually looks kinda good. Economically, though, if it’s shipping three times a month, that means it has to be three times as good to justify the purchase, which I don’t think it will be.