TV « liryon.net

Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

I Can Has Case Study

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

The second in a continuing series of ROFLCon Panel Videos posts, next up is the Cat Macros Panel, I Can Has Case Study.

The stand out performance, for me, on this panel was Arija Weddle, of LOL Secrets. Mostly this was because she is damn cute. That said, I do have a weakness for eastern European girls. However, she didn’t explain her site well enough for the uninitiated, namely me. That prize goes to LOL Trek, but then he had it a little easier to start off with.

These are the highlights of the video, for me, painstakingly transcribed:

Alexis Ohanian: What is it about cats? What makes them so LOLable?”
Cheez:Its multifaceted, they’re really cute but also can be devilish at the same time.

Cheez: [Then there is this] linguistical side, which is actually very fascinating because it is a reflection of whats happening on the internet in terms of abbreviations and self expression. Because you can’t vocalize things you have to tonealize in visual format. So how do you do that with characters?

Female Attendee: So did you only make the one LOLTrek?
Stephen Granade: yes
Female Attendee: Could you please make more? Because I really want to see Jean Luc Picard!
Other Panelist: Would Jean Luc speak LOL?
Stephen Granade: That’s a good question. That’s part of the reason why I never did another – because I thought I’d used a lot of the meta jokes, like Spock speaking in regular language. That I didn’t know what to do again, but that’s a good question, would Picard speak LOL, would he speak French LOL?”

No word yet on the LOLTrek site about a TNG episode :-(

Posted in ROFLCon, Star Trek | Comments Closed

Friday Night’s Alright for Fighting

Monday, May 26th, 2008

Not that there was any fighting on my Friday night, but there was a party. It was on a roof of the Harvard Science Center with a telescope. It was *Shambles: The Party* a manifestation the ROFLCon staff’s “abundant but abstract gratefulness [to the volunteers] into physical form,” and general Team Fatty event. There was Blue Ribbon BBQ, which I came to learn was integral in the genesis of Team Fatty. TF is a loosely formed group that made the mistake of incentivizing overeating; blatantly disregarding the results of a study which indicated that obesity is a social phenomenon. Blue Ribbon and Redbones vie for the title of best BBQ in Boston. I am undecided between the two, I only know that my summer in Texas eating at Rudys has spoiled me. If this is really the best BBQ new england has to offer then this is a sad, sad, state of affairs. That said, it was enjoyable food wise.

Aside from the great views and the food, it was fun to get a chance to see everyone again a month after the conference. I did actually pass one of them around town in the mean time, a sure sign that my plans to meet new people are not completely failing. I also met a girl named Lorelai at the party. She does not look and is not particularly similar to the Gilmore Girls character, but I have actually never met anyone with that name before. It isn’t particularly significant, but I was surprised and interested when she told me her name, and it showed. We had a above average chat until her boyfriend arrived. I later learned she was a vegetarian, so it doesn’t matter anyways in that regard.

As far as discussion topics go there was a great debate over whether it was a conference, where academics meet to discuss issues, or a convention, where fans go to meet celebrities in a given genre. I wasn’t really aware of the consciousness of this choice before; by the time I found out about ROFLCon the format was already well formed, and it sort of was what it was. It was both, a hybrid, with a lean towards conference, at least in my mind. The staff believes that this was instrumental in the success of both convincing internet celebrities to come as well as the success of the overall event. The open question remains how to tweak this delicate balance for the future.

Posted in Gilmore Girls, Panoramas, ROFLCon | Comments Closed

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Monday, May 12th, 2008

I finally saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall this weekend! I have been wanting to see it very much since it opened a week before ROFLCon, and I finally convinced a co-worker to go see it with me (actually he was just out of town for a while he wanted to see it of his own accord). I must say that is was supremely well written, and hilarious. Its like a Will Farrel movie if it was well written and didn’t rely on being idiotically stupid for laughs.

It was written by Jason Segel, who plays Marshall on easily one of my top 2 tv shows, How I Met Your Mother. (The other one being Lost). Every time I see the title I can’t help but think that he chose for the title to include the name of his HIMYM character on purpose to exploit the obvious synergies. There were a lot of great lines in the movie, similar to the kind of amazing lines that Ted delivers on HIMYM. It made me think that Jason Segel must also have a writing credit on the tv show, but (I just checked and) according to IMDB he does not. Maybe they do a lot of ad libbing on the show, or he stole a lot of ideas from the writers on the show, cause they seemed similar.

The movie also features Mila Kunis, of That ’70s Show fame, who was excellent, as all the reviewers said she would be. It’s good to see her acting again and not, as the voice of Meg on Family Guy, getting marginalized. That show, by the way, is so bad now. It has been on a steady decline since episode 2, and now its on episode 110! The real surprise to me was that Kenneth from 30 Rock (Jack McBrayer) essentially reprised his tv show roll in the movie. It’s such a good character that it never hurts to see more of him.

I have some praise for the plot as well. At one point, I was unable to decide which of two directions the movie would go. I was also unable to decide which direction I wanted it to go. This is a common problem with romantic comedies. It becomes easy to pick sides, and then the movie will either do what you want or not. If it does what you want you call it predictable, and if it doesn’t then you call it bad — a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation. Forgetting Sarah Marshall avoids that completely by creating two, round (in the literary sense) and compelling choices. If you’re looking for something less exciting and more funny than Iron Man, go see this one!

Posted in How I Met Your Mother, Movies | Comments Closed

More Scrubs!

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Apparently this will not be the final season of Scrubs. MSNBC reporting on a blog post Zack Braff made:

“I’ve just been informed that I’m not allowed to talk about anything related to Scrubs and its current fate,” Braff said. “What I can tell you is that we are currently shooting 18 episodes for the 8th season. I am not allowed to discuss where one might watch them. (More news to come.)”

They also have more than speculation about what he can’t say.

Sources say ABC is in negotiations to pick up 18 episodes of the show from Disney corporate sibling ABC Studios, which has produced the series for NBC since 2001.

Of course, Scrubs has sucked this season, and pretty much every season since half the cast got pregnant. So what’s another season going to do but draw out the long slow death of a beloved show.

Posted in Scrubs | Comments Closed

Woot.com Podcast

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

I start every workday with the woot.com podcast. It’s hilarious like 80% of the time, catchy about 50% of the time, and kinda lame a very small percentage of the time. Anyways, today’s podcast is about the stupidest six medical shows on tv. Anyways, it was good enough to share. A direct link to the mp3 here.

Now, go listen — spoilers below. Some of you may be familiar with my disdain for medical shows. I have a rule to handle medical shows, avoid them period. I was convinced that Scrubs was good enough to make an exception a few years ago, which was correct, but that is the only blemish on the rule which has served me well. I just want to say, “Take that all you House M.D. fans!” As far as number 5 goes, I must say that I applicate my recent inclusion in the cast of scrubs.

Posted in From the Internet, Reviews, Scrubs | 1 Comment »

How I Met Your Mother

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I finished watching all that exists of CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother this week. It is yet another in the long line of shows that I saw once on an airplane and thought, “maybe this is a good show, but eh, not really worth it,” and then a few months later, Paul, who flies a whole lot less often than I do suggests that I should watch. For the record the only other show currently on this list is Scrubs, but I think that the list will continue to grow. It’s a good, fun show about young people in an apartment in New York. But it is a story of the past told in agonizing detail by a grown man to his teenage children. Obviously the story is of how he met their mother. There is a movie out now, Definitely Maybe, which has the same premise. And I would be seeing it tonight instead of blogging about it if I knew anyone who would go see it with me.

In the show, he started his story many, many years before he met his children’s mother. This seems like an excuse to tell all these self important stories about all the girls who might have been their mother and all of his other super cool youth antics. I’m not saying I’m planning to subject my kids to this kind of story. I was never subjected to this kind of story. But it is a good way to tell all of these stories that stay for the most part locked away by social norms. Telling the story is what appeals to me. In 10th grade religion class we had to write sort of an autobiographical spiritual analysis of out whole lives, and then read it in front of the class. This was scary, but people seemed to take it not as lightly as other religion class assignments, and though embarrassing details were in almost everyone’s papers, to my knowledge, none of them left the room. Anyways, this made me hit upon the idea that it’d be fun to, at some point, find someone else and do pretty much the same thing, going back and forth in parts. Vearing on side tracks often, but always coming back to the core story. This is exactly what the show does. Oh, and the show is hilarious, and the girls on it are hot; that all helps.

The good news is that How I Met Your Mother will return from the strike this season with 9 more episodes (for a total of 20, only 2 short of a normal season for them). The new episode will air on March 17th, so only a month or so to go!

Posted in How I Met Your Mother, Scrubs | 1 Comment »

New Mythbox

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I think i already told everyone who cares, but just in case I didn’t… I recently performed a major upgrade on the Linux box that I use as a Tivo like thing (DVR, PVR, what ever other name you like) running the open source myth tv software, hence the name. For Christmas I got a new capture card that does HDTV, and when I went to install it earlier this month, I quickly discovered that my machine was not powerful enough to play back the 1080i HD content that it was recording. This lead to a scramble to find some hardware upgrade options. There were a lot of constraints that made the search rather difficult that I won’t go into. The end result is that I now have a very super silent beast of a machine running my TV. I must say that after 3 years of using 3 different, but all under powered machines for this purpose, having a beast is nice! The on screen TV guide actually works now, much to the pleasure of my room mates, who actually use that feature. Without further ado I suppose, here is all the hardware in the current system.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2.0GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor

GIGABYTE GA-M61P-S3 AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 / nForce 430 ATX AMD Motherboard

SeaSonic S12 II SS-330GB ATX12V 330W Power Supply

Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

MSI NX7300LE-TD128EH GeForce 7300LE 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card

Oh and theres a 160Gb hard drive and a DVD drive in the thing, but they are legacy. So whats cool about all this, well its quieter by a lot. The iLab guys were always complaining about the noise the old one would make. It wasn’t even that bad, but now their stuff is louder, so I can complain, if I were to care, but I don’t really. Also, its efficient, the power supply is above average at ~80% efficient, and I’m pretty sure the 65 watt CPU is actually using less power than the older, much slower Athlon XP CPU I had in there before. Also, I can now watch HD shows, complete with automatic commercial removal and all the other Tvio like niceties, just in time for Lost season 34! Mmmm should you expect a lost post, soon, hum, you’ll just have to wait and see I suppose.

Posted in Technical, TV | 2 Comments »

Beauty and the Geek Finale

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

So I was not initially a fan of David and Jasmine, despite that Dave is from Somerville, MA and Jasmine is from Columbus, OH. But oh how they are deserving of the win leaps and bounds above Sam and Nicole. By no fault of Nicole’s, it just doesn’t appear that ~~same~~Sam has changed at all. While she certainly is glamming it up now, its hard to tell if there is any other change. Dave and Jasmine clearly changed, and got my vote despite my initial opinion.

So from my previous posts we know that I went to high school and college with Luke, and that a guy I know from work was friends with Jesse from kindergarten through college. It has recently come to my attention that, now pay attention this is a 4 hopper: my room mate Claudia’s not quite boyfriend Nick’s room mate is in a clique with Nicole at Tufts. She hasn’t met her yet. Now I just need to find the 3, and 5 social network hops to cast members; skipping six of course because theoretically you can get anywhere with 6. Then I can feel even more way too connected, especially if its to 2 more geeks. Luckily my friends are telling me not to go on the show, I’m taking that as a good sign.

Here are some interesting screen captures from the final episode, part of a montage, but they are more interesting when you slow it down.

Looks like Luke is in the driver’s seat, but who is in the passenger’s seat and when was this. It looks like a fun little toy.

Man, I really need an HD capture card, what in the world does that shirt say, clearly it’s a joke (they laugh in a few frames), but what is it? In the montage it’s harder to tell there is text on the shirt, which is probably the effect they were going for. I can probably Google up a list of shirts that it could be, but I’m not sure that is worth my time.

Posted in Beauty and the Geek | Comments Closed

It’s Kirk!

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

No, not that Kirk, this one:

That is Sean Gunn, aka Kirk Gleason of Gilmore Girls. He is one of the many reason’s Gilmore Girls was so good, and now hes on October Road in much the same roll of providing great local color to a small town in New England. Although, this small town is not nearly as charming as Star’s Hollow. I can only hope this is a recurring role.

So October Road, is pretty much trash, you can see right through it, but it is interesting enough; it’s by no means a Gilmore Girls replacement. It had a six episode first season run last spring, that should tell you the network thought it was trash as well. Anyways, I haven’t read if its because of the writer’s strike or why on earth this for sure canceled show is back on the air, but they gave it a Thanksgiving night time slot and now its on Mondays. Anyways, if it gives Kirk a job, I’m glad its back on the air. Oh the show also gives jobs to Laura Prepon of that 70’s show fame, and Penny Johnson of Captain Skio’s wife on ST:DS9 fame, if you count that fame; I really don’t like her very much, so pretty much all riding on Kirk here.

Posted in Gilmore Girls | 1 Comment »

Another Week, Another Reason Not to Watch Beauty & the Geek

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

Spoiler Alert:
Yep, so last week Luke left, and this week Jesse is gone. So much for the last remaining people I had a vested interest in. It was a good call on the other player’s part as they were a really strong team and had an alliance with the other team up for elimination, John & Natalie.

Once again it came down to the guys, with my guy in a 1 point deficit, which is really hard to recover from. The guys’ questions are always slow lobs right over the plate, because they are trivia from areas like fashion that really have no trivia; this does not make recovering a point any easier. At least no one spoiled this one for me.

Oh and the Sox won tonight, unlike last week when I had Luke going spoiled, and a Sox loss in the same night. Rough night of watching TV I know. But hey, my bike riding friends say that when the Sox were down 3-1 in ALCS games, they experienced significantly more road rage.