A site that I think is one of the great undiscovered/underpublicised personal sites on the web The War Against Silence. Glenn McDonald is a Cambridge, Massachusetts resident, works in computing (though this is hardly ever mentioned) and writes a weekly music review column, for himself as much as for anyone else reading. His new column is published every week, regular as clockwork and his reviews are more about the human condition and how pop music illuminates or distracts from it than anything else. His taste in music is based on 80's pop music, but from there he can go in many directions. He appears to buy at least an album a day and goes into occasional sprees when he finds an artist that's either obscure or that he had ignored but who, for some reason, has appeared inside his event horizon.
When I first started reading these columns, he was mentioning a lot of bands/artists I'd loved (Kate Bush, Marillion, Tori Amos etc.) plus some I'd heard of but never really followed up (Big Country, Runrig), and a lot I'd either never heard of, or had heard of but not heard (Low, Liz Phair, Buffalo Tom, Emma Townshend, Ian McNabb etc.) and he really hasn't changed much from there. He is (I think) going off on more tangents into related music and to older music (such as the Lloyd Cole stuff he talked about last week and the new Lloyd Cole album this week)

He's up to issue 356 of TWAS, and all of them are still available on line (including his records of the year going back to 1995), just type in the URL (e.g. http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0356.html) and replace the 0356 with any lower number to get that week's issue.

Some weeks he is so obscure and references all bands to other bands I've never heard of, and other weeks he's reviewing the albums I have and love, and I realise that if he loves them as much as I do, and has such interesting and insightful comments on them, that there must be a lot of equally good (or better!) albums out there I've never heard ... highly recommended

How many died at the World Trade Center on September 11th? Initial reports were in the 10-20,000 range, current news stories quote 5-6,500 but an article at CNN.COM says that the latest estimated number is in fact 3,682, and 1,399 of those are still on the "missing presumed dead" list (no death certificate issued yet). And a number of those 1,399 may still be alive because they were reported to have been in the WTC, but in fact may have gone missing or the list just hasn't been updated when they showed up alive and well ... especially residents of foreign countries.CNN.com - Trade center death toll drops below 4,000 - November 21, 2001

EMO - I'd never even heard of this term until a week ago, but here's a great site for finding out what "emo" is (clue 1: it's not the American comedian), how to identify if something is "emo" (clue 2: it's not a type of glue) and how to dress "emo" (clue 3: it's not a doll).

Answer? It's a music-genre (a bit like "punk", in particular "emotionally-charged punk rock" hence "emo".) Though the concept of punk without emotion of some kind worries me (punk, to me, was about energy and personal expression without being restricted by the strictures of having to be able to play an instrument well (it was optional as far as I could tell) or being able to sing well (no way of telling, not many punk-rockers actually "sang" they more shouted in rhythm )) so punk without emotion is like a hand grenade on a piece of elastic ... deadly, energetic, violent but ultimately self-destructive. Emotion should provide both a direction and a destination, even if the destination it shows is actually where the artist is starting from, and it should connect to the audience so that they can see where the artist is and where he/she is going, and the audience can then decide to go along for the ride, or to sit back and watch the artist head for the horizon/off the edge of the precipice...

The What the heck *is* emo, anyway? webpage by andy radin.

I've been reading and following the World Solar Challenge (solar powered vehicle race across Australia, thankfully the short way (top to bottom, Darwin to Adelaide) rather than across!) and I just noticed that the web address for the team is the same university as one of my gaming group is/was working at (she's just in the process of leaving, and double coincidence, I just had a card from her and her husband from where they are on holiday, in Australia!) Spooky!! The UK car crashed but they got it repaired by working through the night, and help was offered by the French car in particular thanks for the UK team helping the French team get their car sorted before the race started. It shows two things, one: that the UK and French can get on just fine thank you very much, and two: that doing good deeds and helping other people is something that is worthwhile doing, not just because it is something you should do, but because no good deed goes unpunished (er... unrewarded!) :-)

New things I've added to my "daily" list ... almost nothing. I sometimes check CNN, I've got friends with LiveJournals and I check out their pages from time to time to see if anyone has said anything interesting, and then I go on a random wander to see if there are *any* interesting people out there ... unfortunately most people who write in LJ are either:
1) going into an intense relationship (and so they are all lovey-dovey and sickening)
2) coming out of an intense relationship (and so they are all bitter and twisted, and sickening)
3) have intensely uninteresting lives that they want to talk about (... yep, sickening!)
4) my friends
5) oh, and goths and trench coat mafia and disaffected yoofs, with obsessions about fantasy TV shows and the characters therein...
6) all of the above!

(ok, there are a very few normal people as well, but their lives aren't as interesting to read, and it sometimes helps to see other people have a worse life than yours to help you appreciate that you haven't hit bottom ... yet.)

However I've updated the weekly list with the Dave Barry articles at the Miami Herald since the SacBee (Sacramento Bee) newspaper has redesigned their website and my previous link broke. Also discovered another columnist on there who has a daily tilt at the news in an interesting, comedic and controversial manner: "SF Gate columnist Mark Morford's irreverent take on world news, events, the pope, dogs, and liquid cheese products. Five days a week. Deeply skewed, very funny. Legal in 47 states." http://sfgate.com/newsletters/ and select "The Daily Fix", also available on-line, but I'm sure you can find it for yourself...

Good music for the last couple of weeks has been provided by those nice people at GreenLinnet who had a 25th Anniversary sale up until the end of October (all artist albums 10 dollars, celtophile compilation CDs only 5 dollars, flat rate postage of $4.50 to anywhere in the world) and so I've now got a stack over a foot high of CDs to work through, which vary from pleasant to absolutely brilliant!

Websites visited today include various sites for the Netherlands railway, ebookers (already listed below), LastMinute.com and British Midland International for a future trip across to Holland. The more commercial websites I visit, the more I realise that the "internet" isn't really ready for professional business yet, everything is buggy, everything is trying too hard to be clever rather than just working, and some sites (even if you pick the "English" option) keep relapsing into local language. As an example of bad design/programming, if you go to the Netherlands Railway site and ask for train information from Amsterdam Schipol to Den Haag HS, you can get it on the international planning link (which also allows you to book a train journey from London Waterloo to Den Haag HS) but if you pick the "domestic" link, you suddenly find that you can't pick Amsterdam Schipol anymore and that the other stations are now labelled in Dutch rather than in English. Also trying to find costs and you are presented with pages that mention special rates and such, but if you try to get information on those specials, then the text is entirely in Dutch, which I don't read particularly well...

What do the following have in common?

Stargate SG1
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Fame
La Femme Nikita
Highlander
MASH

They are all series that started as a standalone film and then someone decided to make them into a series. Now I've seen multiple episodes of each of these series, and the film that "inspired" them and I have the following observations:

Making a TV episode is "cheaper" than making a movie, and needs to be done in less time, but they have the benefit of recurring characters so you can assume a certain level of knowledge on the part of the viewer (without having to keep revealing that McCloud is immortal etc.) and recurring situations (which translates into a limited number of sets etc.).

TV episodes are shorter, which means that in 30 or 60 minutes (well, 22 or 45 for US shows, plus ads) the situation has to be established, transitory characters introduced and motivated and then the conflict must be established, resolved and the final moral delivered, without killing off many/any of the major characters (well, not very often and not very permanantly in most cases...) while a film is usually closer to 120 minutes, no breaks, and you can kill off as many people as you want by the end (so more like a Shakespearean tragedy)

And because TV is not so immersive, there has to be something continuously to keep people's attention, otherwise they'll nip out to the kitchen to make tea, answer the phone, chat or surf the other channels. It gives very little time for anything except the main plot and lots of action.

A film only has to be watched once, and it is rare to go back and watch it many times (in the cinema/movie theatre), and once you get it home of VHS/DVD/Cable then you have all the same problems about making tea, answering the phone etc. plus a small screen (next time you go to the cinema, hold your arm out towards the screen and see how many "thumbs" high the screen is, and how many wide, then do the same when you get home from your normal TV watching position with your TV screen ... now compare the distractions around in both situations, and compare the sound quality. Sure more of us are getting "home cinema" setups, but they still aren't the same (you don't get a pause and rewind button at the cinema, you can't stop the film while you nip out to the toilet, you don't get a large audience laughing along (or crying along) with you at home (unless you have a lot of friends or a big family!)

This means that (in the case of the above films/shows) the TV show tends to be much lighter, more comedic, more formulaic (since it is easier to have the same cast every week, shows like The Outer Limits/The Twilight Zone are obviously exceptions)

Also, for the film, you just need to have *one* good idea, which gets turned into the plot for one film. With the TV shows you need to have dozens of ideas every season, and some are, regretably but necessarily, worse than others. And for every "City on the Edge of Forever" you'll get a "Spock's Brain"...

I watched the "Fame" series for ages before I saw the film (and I was about 17 at the time, attending a US high school and performing in the plays, musicals etc. so I really identified with some of what was happening) and really enjoyed it, and then I saw the film and it was like the difference between a painting of the Grand Canyon and actually being there ... there was more depth, more meaning, more sadness in the film, and it made the TV show seem shallow and silly ...

... the Buffy series is really quite different from the movie, Buffy is a lot smarter and has more depth, and the character interactions are wonderful, but that's the result of five and a half seasons of development and sharing the journey the characters have gone through (and good writing!)

Stargate SG1 was a series I could never imagine being made, but now that it has, I'm surprised by how good it is (even if it has become a "planet of the week" show like the original Star Trek, Next Gen, Voyager and Battlestar Galactica). Good shows of this kind have characters that develop (like in Babylon 5) and on-going stories so that the individual episodes are points on that journey (like a soap opera, except that good SF tends to have a direction/goal while most soaps just have getting on from day to day ... the appeal of things like Dallas were that there was a target, running the Ewing oil business, but that wasn't ever going to be a final destination) while shows like B5 had defeating the Shadows (which is why it lost its way after season 4), Lost In Space/Cattlecar Galactica/Voyager had to get "home", DS9 was a little all over the place but basically it was defeating the bad guys, (which changed season to season, Cardassians, Klingons, things from the Delta quadrant etc. etc.). "Buffy" is a quest for happiness and love, and each character is trying to find it in his/her/its own way to that goal, and also trying to help their friends achieve their goals (even at personal cost) which is what makes it work specially for me ...

... I'll stop there and wait to see if anyone comments ...

Been quiet in here for the last few days ... I've been playing with LiveJournal and it's pretty darn cool!

Had a friend come around on Saturday afternoon and we ended up watching some Angel episodes, La Femme Nikita (the original French film, which we watched in French with English subtitles) and the X-Men movie. La Femme Nikita is a fair bit slower than I remembered it, and when it finished I was trying to remember how the US remake handled their ending (since I remember it was different, I'm just not sure which of the two endings I remember is correct!)

The X-Men movie is still the best comic book based film I've seen (I haven't seen GHOST WORLD and since I never read the comic I've only Jonathon Ross's review to go by, but he reckons that it's a brilliant adaptation). The two things about the X-Men movie that make it different from most comic book adaptations are:
1) It's a good film, with characters and plot and timing. It's not an intellectual film (and never tries to be) but for entertainment and action it works well.
2) It stays remarkably true to the comic book history. The characters seem to have the same personalities in the film as were displayed in the comics, enough background is given and enough incidental characters to show that this is just one story in a larger "universe".

And it avoids the pitfalls of most comic adaptations:
1) The "super story". Take the standard comic book character and put them in a situation that is much bigger/dramatic than their usual comic adventures. In particular put them in a situation where they have to go beyond what their "normal" responses would be. (e.g. rather than just give Superman some villains to defeat, have them succeed in killing Lois Lane, or make Superman give up his superpowers etc.)

2) Take the character and change it to make it more suitable for the big screen (new costume, revised powers etc.)

3) Make it a brightly coloured children's movie. Comics were always brightly coloured, and mostly read by younger adults, but a significant proportion of comic readers are late-teens, twenty-somethings and above. Also the people going to see the movies are in that category and want to see a good film aimed at them not at children. Films like The Phantom seem to have had problems with that.

4) Don't make it an ego vehicle for the actor (Judge Dredd, though that particular film did have an awful lot of good attention to the original stories, Joe Dredd was never shown without his helmet (unless from an angle that made seeing his face impossible, which the film managed to throw away within minutes). Apparantly Sly wanted to make JD and for that I congratulate him, and for the many attempts at getting it right, it's just a shame that it didn't work overall. Compare it with Demolition Man and it's possible to see that they are similar in feel but that Demolition Man works better...

I'm not going to mention animated films/tv series since there are too many of them and I haven't seen most of them....

Good (or at least OK) Comic Book films/tv shows:
X-Men
Judge Dredd
Blade
The Flash (tv series)
some episodes of Lois&Clark
Batman TV series (for amusement)
First Batman film (Tim Burton, yay! Michael Keaton, surprisingly good)

Below average:
The Phantom
Tank Girl ? (based on reviews I've heard, never saw it or read the comic)
Captain America
most of Lois&Clark
Wonder Woman
Most of the other Batman films
The Incredible Hulk tv series
Spiderman tv episodes (live action)

any one got any other thoughts/reviews?