XBMC Frodo

2012-12-07, 10:42 pm
Categories: Movies, Music, Tech, TV

Updated to the latest XBMC beta. It messed up most of my show icons and watched/unwatched status, and for some reason defaulted my sound output to a virtual device instead of the output I'd had it set to previously, but I've got it mostly-fixed now.

There really is a lot to love about XBMC -- it's certainly the best software I've found for easily indexing a video library -- but man it sure is fiddly.

But hopefully this version will fix the previous "stable" version's habit of locking up my system and my video output and forcing me to log out and back in to fix it.

Freak Out! A Day with Cal Schenkel by Pauline Butcher

2012-12-06, 11:59 pm
Categories: Books, Music

Via uploader paulineharrisonbird (née, presumably, Butcher):

Cal Schenkel, artist/designer of early Frank Zappa albums, Freak Out, Absolutely Free, We're Only In It for the Money, and others is seen here hanging out with Pauline Butcher, secretary to Frank Zappa and author of Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa; Squidget, Gail Zappa's younger brother (not Midget as annotated) and Casey, caretaker to Frank and Gail Zappa. 'Anything' was written and is sung by Ray Collins (from Ruben & the Jets).

Ms. Butcher Bird is the author of the book Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa. I expect I'll be getting back to her at some point...

(And yes it's a little past midnight and I'm cheating on the timestamp again. Ran late with that Who post. And here I didn't know what I was going to post about today...)

Netflix Does Something Stupid and Annoying

2012-12-06, 11:57 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, TV

So I just went to fire up some old Doctor Who, only to find that every single Doctor Who serial had been purged from my Netflix queue.

So I thought, What the hell? Has Doctor Who been removed completely from Netflix Streaming?

It turns out that no, it hasn't, they've just decided to make it way more difficult to find and navigate!

See, now instead of having the old Doctor Who serials split up by title -- Horror of Fang Rock, Caves of Androzani, and so forth -- they've combined them all under a single heading, Classic Doctor Who.

Which may sound like a good idea -- and it would be, if it were put together by someone with a basic understanding of how human beings locate things! -- but sadly, it was put together by complete goddamned morons.

See, instead of being sorted by serial titles, the series is split up into 18 "collections". Numbered. 1-18. And you have to click on the number of the collection to see what serial's actually in it.

Which might make some sort of sense if they had the complete series split up into seasons. Or had at least one serial from every season. Or, I don't know, even put them in the right damn order. But they don't. Here's the order (Edit 2013-01-01: The order has been changed since this original posting; go to the end of the post for the current order):

  1. The Carnival of Monsters [sic] (1973)
  2. Horror of Fang Rock (1977)
  3. Pyramids of Mars (1975)
  4. Spearhead from Space (1970)
  5. The Androids of Tara (1978)
  6. The Ark in Space (1975)
  7. The Aztecs (1964)
  8. The Caves of Androzani (1984)
  9. The City of Death [sic] (1979)
  10. The Curse of Fenric (1989)
  11. The Green Death (1973)
  12. The Leisure Hive (1980)
  13. The Mind Robber (1968)
  14. The Pirate Planet (1978)
  15. The Power of Kroll (1978)
  16. The Ribos Operation (1978)
  17. The Three Doctors (1972)
  18. The Visitation (1982)

And it took me actually listing them all out where I can see them all at once, but now at least I understand how they're sorted: they're alphabetical, sort of. Except nobody bothered to add the convention of dropping articles from the sort, so serials beginning with "The" (which is nearly all of them) appear under "T".

(Except The Carnival of Monsters -- probably because that is not actually the title of the episode; it's just called Carnival of Monsters, which does fit the sort. Which indicates that maybe the database has both a display title and an indexing title for each episode -- but who the hell even knows. Especially since City of Death isn't actually called The City of Death, either.)

So, want to see if Netflix has a given Doctor Who serial, out of the 128 extant serials that make up the original series? All you have to do is poke around half-blindly through 18 not-quite-alphabetically-sorted collections and see if it's there! That is, if you know they're sort-of-alphabetical -- which you probably won't even notice, looking at them one-by-one. (Actually, I'm going to go add a review to the page right now that explains that, with the full order -- hopefully it'll help somebody.) If you don't notice, well, just click on all 18!

Amazon, meanwhile? If you type in "Doctor Who: The Caves of Androzani", the first match is Doctor Who (Classic) Season 21, which does in fact have a streaming video of The Caves of Androzani. They don't have as many episodes available for streaming as Netflix does, and some of them cost money to watch even if you have a Prime account. But they're sure the hell organized way better.

Of course, the easiest way to find any of these episodes, without worrying about availability, nonsensical navigation, or the possibility that you'll just find them all removed from your queue one day without notice, is just to torrent the damn things.

Kinda makes you feel like a chump for paying good money for Netflix and Amazon Prime, don't it?

Edit 2013-01-01: The order has been changed; they're now in chronological episode order:

  1. The Aztecs (1964)
  2. The Mind Robber (1968)
  3. Spearhead from Space (1970)
  4. The Three Doctors (1972)
  5. The Carnival of Monsters [sic] (1973)
  6. The Green Death (1973)
  7. The Ark in Space (1975)
  8. Pyramids of Mars (1975)
  9. Horror of Fang Rock (1977)
  10. The Ribos Operation (1978)
  11. The Pirate Planet (1978)
  12. The Androids of Tara (1978)
  13. The Power of Kroll (1978)
  14. The City of Death [sic] (1979)
  15. The Leisure Hive (1980)
  16. The Visitation (1982)
  17. The Caves of Androzani (1984)
  18. The Curse of Fenric (1989)

So at least, if you were to for some reason want to watch a small selection of 25 years' worth of Doctor Who in chronological order, you could do that now. But it's still a legitimate hassle to find episodes by title, like a normal person.

Best/Worst of Times, etc.

2012-12-05, 8:53 pm
Categories: Comics, Movies, Stream of Consciousness

Yesterday I talked about Karen Berger's imminent departure from Vertigo, the disappointment I feel as a Vertigo fan, and the excitement I feel wondering what she'll do next.

And you know, that's kind of the perfect metaphor for what it feels like to be a comics fan in general right now. There's just so much bullshit -- but there's so much gold, too.

Since the 1940's, the American comics industry has gone through a regular, 20-year boom-bust cycle. We're in an odd-numbered decade, so if the pattern continues that means we've got another bust coming. And while I think Marvel and especially DC are full-speed-ahead on stupid management decisions to cause the next one, this one's not going to be like the others -- it's going to be smaller, it's going to be confined to those two major publishers, and it's going to happen even as their characters and brands increase in popularity.

Now, both companies seem dead-set on repeating most of the worst excesses of the 1990's -- variant covers, new #1's, big summer crossovers, increasingly muddled continuity reboots, Jim Lee -- and don't seem to get the idea that this is going to go much like it did in the '90's, with a brief boost to sales followed by a crash as everybody gets sick of this crap. DC, in particular, is currently being run by bean counters at Warner who think their best shot at relevance is pushing the Reset button on their universe again and putting out prequels to Watchmen.

Even still, DC's still managing to put out some great books. Dial H is fantastic, Demon Knights is a joy, and Animal Man and Frankenstein were both pretty great until they muddled into an unnecessary crossover. I really don't think it's a coincidence that the best books coming out of DC are the ones that are subject to the least corporate interference and are the least subject to the whims of shared-universe continuity.

And that's just DC proper. Take the the industry as a whole and there's a stunning variety of wild, beautiful, original books -- Saga, Chew, Manhattan Projects, The Massive, to name just a few. There are even some wonderful licensed books -- Adventure Time, Popeye, Godzilla: The Half-Century War. Prophet shows that even a 1990's Liefeld property can turn into a brilliant, offbeat science fiction series worthy of classic Heavy Metal. Dark Horse Presents demonstrates the depth and breadth of modern comics at its greatest, at 80 pages for $8 a month.

And that's just the new stuff. As far as classic comics, there's an embarrassment of riches. When I gave my cousin a copy of The Completely Mad Don Martin -- a collection of the cartoonist's entire Mad output, in two oversized hardcover books in a slipcase, weighing in at about 25 pounds -- my uncle looked at it and said "Did you ever think you'd see anything like this?" The mere idea that, in two generations, Mad has gone from being dismissed as trash to being given reverential treatment.

There's so much in print -- Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse, Carl Barks's Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, exhaustive collections of Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, Terry and the Pirates, Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, Mary Perkins On Stage, Pogo, Tintin. You can get the complete Bone in a single black-and-white volume or a dozen color trades from Scholastic. Love and Rockets is collected in paperbacks or hardcovers, pick your Poison River. The other day I was at the library and saw a huge hardback collection of Walter Simonson's entire Thor run (only the worthy may lift it). There are glorious hardcover collections highlighting the work of Kirby, Ditko, Wood, Davis, Kurtzman, Wolverton, Eisner -- the choices are staggering.

And that's just the stuff that's in print.

You wanna talk about digital? You can buy the entirety of Quantum and Woody right the fuck now (and there's a rumor of two finished-but-never-published issues on the way too). Sure, digital comics has its issues -- DRM and the inevitable platform fragmentation and compatibility problems that DRM causes -- but it's still early days and that stuff'll get ironed out.

And that's just the stuff you have to pay for. Head on over to a site like Digital Comic Museum and you can gaze upon thousands of public-domain comics, completely free of charge.

And that's just the stuff that's available legally.

You want a comic that, for various rights reasons, will never be reprinted? Jack Kirby's 2001? Moore, Bissette, Veitch, et al's 1963? The infamous Air Pirates Funnies? Can't stop the signal; they're easier to find now than they were when they were in print.

So, all in all? It's plenty easy to get frustrated with the direction DC and Marvel are going in. It's easy to foresee their readership tanking and bringing on another crash and panic. But Avengers and Dark Knight Rises are still Hollywood blockbusters; their publishers aren't going away -- and even if they vanished overnight, there would be so much good stuff left to fill the vacuum that I, for one, wouldn't miss them...much.

Truth is, for all the bullshit, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a comics fan -- not even the 1940's.

And I shouldn't have to say this, but just to be perfectly clear: I am absolutely not advocating illegally downloading comics that are commercially available. Support publishers you like. Support creators you like. Support your local comic shop.

And if you download a work that's out-of-print, or otherwise acquire a book that doesn't benefit the creators or their families, it's a good idea to buy something that does. You like 2001 (or, for that matter, any of Kirby's Marvel work)? Buy Kirby: Genesis and send some money his family's way. Like 1963? Pick up some Swamp Thing trades, and keep an eye out for Bissette's Tales of the Uncanny.

Or whatever it is you're into. Bottom line? Find something you love, support the people who make it happen, and tell your friends.

Stern '85, Part 1

2012-12-04, 8:45 pm
Categories: Music, Politics

Zappa's first visit to The Howard Stern Show, 1985. A bit of talk about the Porn Wars, and his concern about where the money from Live Aid was going. Uploaded by fruhko.

"Have you ever heard of a service charge on a ticket?" Happier times.

Berger

2012-12-04, 2:13 pm
Categories: Comics, Stream of Consciousness

Vertigo isn't what it was.

Have they had a big hit since Y? I can't think of one. Fables is still ongoing (along with spinoff Fairest), and they put out a new edition of Sandman every two years (with a new miniseries coming!), but I can't think of a new series becoming a real barn burner since 2002.

Not to say there aren't series that deserve it. Northlanders, Scalped, DMZ, American Vampire, iZombie, and my personal favorites, Sweet Tooth and The Unwritten -- they've all been critical successes, and they've all stuck around awhile (the shortest run of the lot was iZombie's 28 issues). But for a long time I've gotten the impression that the bean counters aren't happy with the results.

From what I understand, Vertigo's contracts are a lot more restrictive than they used to be -- "creator-owned" in a technical sense but giving a whole lot of the rights over to DC.

And lately, they've been shutting down popular Vertigo series to reintegrate popular characters back into the DC universe -- Swamp Thing and John Constantine are the two biggest examples.

So when I read yesterday that Karen Berger was stepping down as EiC of Vertigo, it came as a blow but not a surprise.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Karen Berger changed the American comics industry. She put Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben on Swamp Thing; she brought Moore and David Lloyd's work on V for Vendetta into the DC fold and gave them the opportunity to finish it. And then she put Neil Gaiman on Sandman.

That would have been one hell of a résumé all by itself. But then: Vertigo. Sandman wasn't just an amazing and unique book -- it led to an entire imprint based on the premise of amazing and unique books. It reminded comics fans -- and showed new fans, perhaps for the first time -- that comics can be anything. And that "mature" can actually mean "mature" instead of being a euphemism for "blood and guts and cursing and maybe titties".

It's been just shy of twenty years, and Vertigo's influence -- and Karen Berger's -- can't be overstated. It changed the way people looked at comics and consistently produced some of the best comics on the stands and in the bookstores.

But I get the distinct impression that current DC management doesn't care. And I'm not talking about Didio, Johns, Lee -- I think they all like Vertigo just fine. But DC is, increasingly, not a company run by comics creators, or people who know or care about comics. Warner's in charge. Warner doesn't want critically-acclaimed books with mediocre sales, it wants crossovers and prequels and sequels and reboots and corporate synergy and brand leveraging.

So Berger's out. And on the one hand, it's a shame to see her go -- I really think the writing's on the wall for the entire Vertigo line at this point. Fables will keep going because it's a moneymaker; it won't change much except that it might get a DC logo on its cover instead of the Vertigo one. But every other Vertigo book? Well, I'm nervous as a reader and I'd be more nervous still if I were a creator.

On the other hand, Berger's already changed the face of American comics, and even if DC is no longer a place where she can innovate, there are plenty of other publishers that I'm sure would be thrilled to have her.

And not just publishers -- there's a very long list of comics creators who refuse to work with DC anymore but who have nothing but nice things to say about Karen. And I'm betting they'll call her before she calls them.

Peefeeyatko

2012-12-03, 11:16 pm
Categories: Movies, Music, Politics

A documentary by Henning Lohner. Uploaded by, yes, tomtiddler1.

It's a fascinating look at Zappa and his passions -- the mad scientist/monster movie angle is a good choice; Zappa notes in The Real Frank Zappa Book that his first impression on seeing a picture of Edgard Varèse was that he looked like a mad scientist. Zappa was a mad scientist too -- and really this documentary is devoted primarily to his experimentation with new technology, and his determination to reach perfection unattainable by mere mortals and their human error.

That and just making crazy noises.

Slonimsky

2012-12-02, 10:42 pm
Categories: Music

Description by uploader barun432:

Nicolas Slonimsky talks about his association with Frank and his daughter Moon Unit in a public discussion organized by Charles Amirkhannian. He also talks about Zappa' music, about Edgard Varese and the Synclavier