17 entries from March 2008.




What would you like to see here?

I started the Media Pundit back in July of last year for two reasons:1. Focus mattersBack in the day while I was hosted on Blogspot (the blogging service Google bought from Pyra) I made some bad choices. First, the name of the blog ("Bitch What?") generally reflected an attitude rather than a theme. Once I decided to write about what I like and know the most about -- writing of different sorts with a focus on TV -- it was apparent that Bitch What? wasn't where I needed to be. I wanted some distance from that and a second try.2. Room for growthBeing able to manage my own publishing platform (here I use Movabletype, the same software that powers BoingBoing,...


Top 5 posts for March 2008

Here is a short list of the top 5 read posts on this site for the month of March, ranked by views. Some of these are up at the top because of being picked up on social networking/voting sites and had 90% of their popularity over the course of just two days, but they were popular none the less and so they make the list. A couple rank highly every month due to awkward yet not unwelcome search engine traffic. If you like this site and haven't read any of these stories, please take a moment and check them out.Best scifi film poll topped by non-scifi flick (1,382 views)The Scifi Channel website ran a poll this month asking their readers...


Terminator, Jericho, Stargate movie thoughts

The Terminator TV show will return for another go; Jericho got canceled again; thoughts on Stargate: The Ark of Truth
, , ,

Big Content Still Doesn't Get It

Eric Bangeman writing for Ars Technica wrote yesterday about a change coming in April in the way DirecTV's satellite receiver/DVR combo will treat pay-per-view recordings. As has been feared ever since a bug in a TiVo software update triggered a "lockdown" of sorts on programming that would only remain on the system for 24 hours before being automatically deleted -- whether you wanted that to happen or not -- it seems that DirecTV has caved to outside pressure and implemented precisely this type of content control, effective April 15th....
,

Battlestar S4 premier will be streamed early

The good news is that there's some new Battlestar Galactica on the way, in fact it should be roaming free on or about April 4th around noon, depending on where you live. The bad news is that the last I heard, Scifi still had not decided whether or not to split the fourth season into two parts like they do with everything else. Worse, yet still in intriguing, is that Scifi will air the season premier online via the scifi.com website about 10 hours before it is broadcast the old fashioned way....


3 months later, no NY Times retraction on DHD falsehoods

Back in November there was a story in the New York Times by Brian Stelter about Deadline Hollywood Daily blogger Nikke Finke. As much as the strike had captured peoples attention for a time, it was still very much a non-story as far as the Internet was concerned. I found it hard to believe at that time, six days after the strike had begun, claims by Finke that her blog -- which up until that point was dedicated to boring insider gossip, such as which studio executive just got fired, and which big name actor just fired his agent and moves to a different agency -- was getting as many as 300,000 page views per day before, and was now...


Nicholl, ABC/Disney Fellowship reminders

Since I'm running behind on this myself, I suppose it might be helpful to anyone that's interested in writing for either television or film: The Nicholl Fellowship has been open for 2008 submissions since January, and their deadline is coming up on May 1st. This is a fellowship, not a contest. Winners are paid by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscars people) to do nothing by write for the period of one year, somewhere around $30,000 I believe. The point is to discover new writing talent, and then give them the financial means (at least for a single year) to do nothing but write. The judging process is extensive and includes Academy members, professional script readers,...


What's worse, paparazzi, or DUI-prone actors?

I just Twitter'd about actor Thomas Jane being arrested and charged with a DUI in California this morning, but I want to actually talk about it for a minute. It seems like not a week goes by that some actor or actress isn't charged with DUI somewhere in this country -- mainly L.A. Michelle Rodriguez had a DUI stop in Hawaii while she was still working on Lost, and I remember her case especially because she has racked up more than a few of these over the past couple of years. Given the choice between community service or jail, she actually chose jail, which while good for the rest of us since it kept her off the highway, doesn't...


I have a Twitter in my pants

I've signed up with a micro-blogging service called Twitter. It's kind of hard to describe -- people post a message to twitter up to 140 characters long, which then gets "pushed" out to people who are "following" your twitter account/feed/whatever. Messages go out over email, cellphone SMS, instant messaging, and can be tracked via RSS. The character limit originates from this being a SMS service originally, with the purpose of pushing out information rather than you having to seek it out.Push technology is not new. There used to be a service called Pointcast which was a program you ran on your computer, where you selected different categories of news that interested you, and then you left it running. When you...


Hollywood Tuna accusing Egotastic of poaching content

Hollywood Tuna accuses Egotastic of poaching its content..that it doesn't own and didn't make. Taking a look a link aggregators and how ridiculous this claim is.
,

The TV Landscape is Changing, and We Better Be Ready

While the studios and networks that produce virtually all television content are monoliths that respond slowly to change, and often fight it to their own detriment, we're all experiencing a transformation of that medium in ways that nobody truly seems to understand.Last year's fall television season would likely have continued an unfortunate yet increasingly common trend where the networks divide an industry-standard 22 or 24-episode season into two distinct halves. Some networks have taken to calling the forced mid-season hiatus the "season finale" without bothering to call the corresponding return the "season premier", as if the industry is floating the idea of redefining the term until a "season" consists of about 11 or 12 episodes, but don't really want to...


Lots to find fault with in The Last Man

Stargate Atlantis aired its fourth season finale on Friday, called The Last Man, and it really was a mixed bag that had an interesting peek into a grim future, but really failed to deliver a knockout punch that the best season yet truly deserved. This bag had enough things in it that most people should have been able to pull out something to enjoy, but it actually felt really very empty to me. Kindred 1&2 felt like the season was going to end in such a way that the finale could figuratively and -- within that fictional universe -- literally explode in practically any direction that could drastically reshape the entire galaxy in which the show takes place. Something so...


Rain come, me go.

Posting to blogs is hard when you rely on a satellite for Internet connectivity, a system extremely prone to lengthy outages when it rains, or lately, when it gets darkly overcast in the southern sky. It kept me pacing the house and swearing furiously at a defenseless blue modem that was trying its best to connect me to the outside, lest I rip the coax cables from the back and sacrifice it in a blazing fire in the back yard in a mad fit of rage....


Terminator spin-off did everything wrong

I'm looking forward to the season finale of Stargate Atlantis this evening, and don't forget there is supposed to be a one-minute long preview for the SG-1 straight-to-DVD movie sometime during the broadcast. The episode looks great and puts a strong finish on this season, so congrats to all of them for getting it done and earning a fifth season.Sometime this weekend I imagine I'll end up watching the "season" finale of the Terminator spin-off. Can you even call nine episodes a season? How can nine episodes here, and 22 episodes over there both be considered a season? One is clearly less than half of the other, so if you ask me, and I know you didn't, it's really stretching...


Best scifi film poll topped by non-scifi flick

The Scifi Channel website recently ran an email poll asking readers to pick their top 10 favorite science fiction films of all time, from AFI's own top 50 list published at times unknown. It's of little surprise that one of the Star Wars films topped the list, even though isn't not anything remotely close to science fiction unless you broaden the meaning to include pretty much anything that takes place in space. If it's 50 years in the future, and I'm standing on the moon taking a dump, well that's science fiction according to Scifi.This -- coming from The Science Fiction Channel -- that shows pro-wrestling and B-horror movies on the weekend. This list represents the best of science fiction...


New Feature - Email This

While I ponder a misguided email threat from censorshipbucket photobucket.com, I'll note that I've added a link at the bottom of my posts on this website called "EMail This!" that, as you have correctly deduced, will present you with a page that will email the current post title, part of its summary, and a link with an invitation to your intended victim target to pollute their mind with my rants and ravings.Because such a thing doesn't come with Moveable Type (my publishing platform) I spent the better part of a day writing the code myself. It works well enough and allows you to harass notify up to 10 different people that I have spoken, and should come here thusly and...


Stargate Atlantis going out on a high note

Sorry about being dark over the past week. If there's anything I've done over the past six months that could be considered regular, it's that I don't post much or at all over the weekend. Monday went from a potential day of record personal achievement in writing to a day spent cleaning. It rained all day and night on Tuesday, killing my net connection, and today I'm at the height of a miserable head cold.Feeling crappy did give me the much needed excuse to catch up on the two most recent episodes of Stargate Atlantis, which were, thankfully, better than I had hoped....



Media Pundit categories