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I must confess, even though I find Barack Obama to be an intellectual lightweight with a resume thinner than Kate Moss, I have to admit that his website is absolutely the best campaign site ever devised. It makes me not a whit more likely to vote for him, and it doesn’t make up for his appalling lack of substance, but I’ll give damnation by faint praise where damnation by faint praise is due.
Wired’s Lore Sjoberg has this excellent video on how to avoid common logical fallacies on the Internet:
The story of these hilariously violent animations is the subject of this Wired article.
Battlestar Galactica is the best show on television. Even after four years, it still seems just a little crazy to say that. After all, the original was one of the schlockiest shows created, a grab bag of Star Wars mixed with Mormon theology and sci-fi cliche. The brilliance of Ronald D. Moore’s remake is that it takes the essential part of the Galactica story and turns it into what good sci-fi should be: a story that takes relevant issues to our times and puts them in a new context that gets the audience to think critically about our world.
Galactica is one of those shows that reinvents an entire genre. Instead of the sterility of Star Trek, Galactica plunges us into a gritty and realistic world. Instead of cookie-cutter characters who can do no wrong, the characters on Galactica are flawed, make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are deadly. Instead of cheesy dialog and unrealistic technology, Galactica was conceived in such a way that a viewer could easily mistake it for a historical drama set on an aircraft carrier. The whole point of these changes is to make Galactica more relevant to our times. We can identify with Admiral Adama because he’s not the sort of perfect leader who can do no wrong, but a realistically portrayed human being faced with an impossible situation.
This will be the fourth and final season. Unlike shows that draw on forever, well passed their expiry date (I’m looking at you, X-Files), Galactica is going to tell a self-contained story. It’s a gutsy move to end a popular show, but it would be easy for a show like Galactica to fall into cliche and collapse under its own weight. Every season, Galactica has done something to radically alter the very nature of the show—few shows on TV are so daring.
Usually, the first episode after a series’ pilot is the singularly worst episode of the series. Everyone’s still finding the character, trying to get ahold of the series’ budget, and the writers are still trying to figure out what the show is really about. “33″—the first regular episode of Batlestar Galactica is one of the best scripted TV episodes ever created. It’s tense, it’s daring, and it is relentless in setting the tone for the entire show. Even among the cast it’s a favorite. A show that can start that strongly is a rare thing indeed, and if Galactica can go out with as much strength as had at the beginning, it will have cemented itself as one of the top TV dramas ever created.
The fourth and final season premieres tonight on the SCI FI Channel.
Over at Concurring Opinions Daniel Solove has a series of audio interviews with the creators of Battlestar Galactica that touch on the legal and ethical question raised by the series. As both a BSG geek and a law geek, this is like encountering Nerdvana.
Galactica has offered some interesting grounds for philosophical debate about issues like the nature of law, terrorism, morality and how they all interact with society. What makes the show so attractive, especially to lawyers, is the depth of the show and how well it does what science-fiction should do—say something profound not about some fictional world, but get people to think about our world. Galactica threw out plenty of SF clichés in favor of a grittier and more realistic approach.
The teaser trailer for Star Trek is now available in full-HD glory.
It looks like J.J. Abrams (who created a little show called Lost) is setting to take the old Trek formula and give it a well-needed kick in the pants. The retro-futurism of the trailer is a very different direction, but it still fits with the overall vision of the series. It will be very interesting to see if Abrams can not only get fans of the show into theater seats, but bring new fans to the franchise.
A first look at the new U.S.S. Enterprise.
I’m curious to see how J.J. Abrams brings back Star Trek, a franchise that badly needed some new blood. Recasting the original cast is a bold movie (Simon Pegg as Scotty?!), but Star Trek badly needs an update after years of the same old stuff. This seems to be the kind of bold reinvention of the franchise that could keep it alive, just as the Bond franchise got a much-needed retooling with Casino Royale.