Scooby Doo, where are you?
I
wonder if it was theoretically possible to make a TV show about
vampires that didn't involve any kind of gothic imagery. Probably not.
Last night we watched the first episode of British vampire series "Hex",
touted as "UK's answer to Buffy". Oh man, was that show ever a sad
sight. It was like the writers had some kind of a contest going on of
how cliched and predictable the episode can be made, since once the
characters and setting had been introduced after the first fifteen
minutes or so, every single event of the rest of the episode was
obvious. After a while, we started to comment the show in MST3K style
to the best of our abilities. This show if anything is ripe for such
mockery, since all lines practically write themselves. To my delight,
it was like the producers just knew that the show sucked, so they had
the main heroine stand boob-naked in the shower for no apparent reason.
Speaking of Buffy, by the way, the essay "Brownskirts" (PDF) published in the collection "Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy" explains why Buffy and her friends who the progressives love so much are actually purely fascist characters straight out of the ideological playbook of Nazi Germany. (It is probably not a coincidence that Buffy loves primitive weaponry that she uses to turn the lower breeds who lurk in the night to ashes.)
I also have to wonder why the simple concept of incremental search is not more common than it is in computer programs that manipulate text, such as word processors and browsers. Emacs has had it for what, decades now, FireFox has had it for a few years, but that's about it. For those not familiar with the concept, it means that when you want to search for a pattern inside the text, you can just type CTRL-S in Emacs (or even better in FireFox, nothing) and start typing what you are looking for, and the search happens real-time so that immediately after each character that you type in, the search cursor jumps to the next occurrence of the pattern that you typed in so far. Once you get used to this, having to search something by opening a dialog window and typing in the whole pattern feels like such a pain. Especially if the system treats searching for a nonexistent pattern as an error that it has to punish the user for by opening another dialog and sounding the system fatal error sound effect. That one is truly a cherry on top of bad design. And yes please, when I am searching for something and it isn't found, I would like to continue from the beginning of the document. Do you really have to ask that every time?
Speaking of searching for stuff, why doesn't Google blog search seem to work? Several times that I have tried to search for something in the archives of my old Finnish blog, it doesn't find a single page containing a term that I am sure the blog contains in the post that I am looking for. I know this, since when I painfully search for the post by hand and copypaste the word to the search box, the result page still has the audacity to claim that no pages were found. Similarly, when you try to see who is linking to this blog, several pages that I know link here and are indexed by Google are missing. Perhaps this is why the Google search is so very fast.
Speaking of Buffy, by the way, the essay "Brownskirts" (PDF) published in the collection "Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy" explains why Buffy and her friends who the progressives love so much are actually purely fascist characters straight out of the ideological playbook of Nazi Germany. (It is probably not a coincidence that Buffy loves primitive weaponry that she uses to turn the lower breeds who lurk in the night to ashes.)
I also have to wonder why the simple concept of incremental search is not more common than it is in computer programs that manipulate text, such as word processors and browsers. Emacs has had it for what, decades now, FireFox has had it for a few years, but that's about it. For those not familiar with the concept, it means that when you want to search for a pattern inside the text, you can just type CTRL-S in Emacs (or even better in FireFox, nothing) and start typing what you are looking for, and the search happens real-time so that immediately after each character that you type in, the search cursor jumps to the next occurrence of the pattern that you typed in so far. Once you get used to this, having to search something by opening a dialog window and typing in the whole pattern feels like such a pain. Especially if the system treats searching for a nonexistent pattern as an error that it has to punish the user for by opening another dialog and sounding the system fatal error sound effect. That one is truly a cherry on top of bad design. And yes please, when I am searching for something and it isn't found, I would like to continue from the beginning of the document. Do you really have to ask that every time?
Speaking of searching for stuff, why doesn't Google blog search seem to work? Several times that I have tried to search for something in the archives of my old Finnish blog, it doesn't find a single page containing a term that I am sure the blog contains in the post that I am looking for. I know this, since when I painfully search for the post by hand and copypaste the word to the search box, the result page still has the audacity to claim that no pages were found. Similarly, when you try to see who is linking to this blog, several pages that I know link here and are indexed by Google are missing. Perhaps this is why the Google search is so very fast.
To my delight, it was like the producers just knew that the show sucked, so they had the main heroine stand boob-naked in the shower for no apparent reason.
You Canadians are so lucky. That would never be allowed on television here in the United States, except on (1) a pay channel like HBO or Showtime; or (2) an obscure channel like Independent Film Channel or World Link TV that no one watches.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 11:51 AM