Media roulette

I didn't watch the Oscars last night because, well, network television. Judging by my Netflix connection (why, yes, I'm still with Verizon right now) I wasn't the only person who decided to give the 86th Academy Awards a pass. These award shows are more or less like baseball anyway, in that although they take three hours to play out you can take in the essential action in five minutes, over the internet, afterwards. Although I might have enjoyed seeing John Travolta introduce Idel Dazeem live, if only to give my eyebrows a workout.

Girlfriend and I have a policy of not watching The Walking Dead immediately before bed because she has zombie dreams and if she hears me getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night she is liable to murder me with the heaviest thing she can find. As it happens this year we've mostly developed a policy of watching each Sunday's episode of TWD during the snow day the following Monday.

We ended up watching Moon, which means we watched Sam Rockwell Sam Rockwell Sam Rockwell for two hours. It was very good and very sad, and I had thought we had escaped watching an untrustworthy Kevin Spacey by ruling out House of Cards for the night but no.

There are two kinds of pain, Sam...

I don't want to give the impression that I'm spending all my time watching television instead of reading. I'm just still reading The Stand.

While I wasn't actually watching Netflix, I did spend some time on their site, rating movies. Because it's fun. Because it helps them help me. Because it's addictively distracting. Because it gave me ideas for what to watch (when it randomly threw out Moon, that's when I decided to watch it, though I watched it on Amazon). Because it's... interesting to see how it categorizes movies.

After you rate a movie, Netflix asks you how often you watch movies like the ones you just rated. As I went on, I got the distinct impression that Netflix was messing with me.

How often do you watch movies about marriage like American Beauty?

How often do you watch dysfunctional family movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

How often do you watch tortured genius movies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?

How often do you watch father-daughter movies like The Incredible Hulk?

How often do you watch movies about cool mustaches like O Brother, Where Art Thou?

How often do you watch holidays like Independence Day?

Netflix, stars, treks, observations thereon

Since Netflix came into my house I've become keenly aware that I had been living the life of a savage, eking media one serving at a time out of solid-form magnetic storage devices.  I get the feeling that the next generation is going to think of bandwidth like we think of running water: so essential, pervasive, and reliable that it’s easy to forget how recently it became normal.  (Not that my bandwidth is that reliable.  I’m writing this post in Word while I wait for my webotubes to unclog.  But I suspect that I will live to see the datastream made continuous.)  Now, I hope never to live in a house without a bookshelf, and probably a DVD collection as well, but I wonder if the first generation to see indoor plumbing didn’t also have its holdouts who never learned to trust pipes enough to move somewhere without a well.

Thanks to Netflix, I have joined some of my friends in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I remember watching ST:TNG with my dad when it was on television originally, and never took to another Trek like I did that one.  But being the tender age I was, I missed the first few seasons.  The opportunity to go back and watch from “Encounter at Farpoint” has been… fascinating.

The episodes of the first season I’ve seen have not been the Trek I remember.  Certainly if I didn’t know what it would become, I wouldn’t seek out more episodes.  There’s a lot of bad.  But, as with Q vis a vis the human race, the pilot shows just enough potential that we’re willing to withhold judgment for a season or two.

The geneses are there of what would become really cool by the end of the series.  It lays out the cast of characters that, with a little tweaking (sorry, Tasha) provide a rich range of characters to play with, without resorting to the sort of incompetence and destructive behavior that fueled the drama in, say, Battlestar Galactica.  (In some regards, ST:TNG is a procedural, like Law and Order or The West Wing; we come to it to see the crew of the Enterprise do their jobs well.)

All in all, it’s a sort of homo erectus to the original series’ Australopithecus.  In time we’ll see the show develop intellectually, and learn to knap Worf’s head into a more functional shape.

But I must say, one thing that really struck me is that in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, humans have apparently evolved into a race of insufferable space twits.  Couldn’t we have learned anything about diplomacy?  Tolerance?  Instead, say, when an alien ambassador wants to show Commander William “Babyface” Riker his scrapbook, he just smiles and says, “Oh, scrapbooking.  We humans gave up that barbaric practice long ago.”

One thing it really makes me want to do is read Wil Wheaton’s book, Memories of the Future, because looking back on this show can be so darn fun, and I’ve seen him do it with merciless, good-natured verve.

I come back to my newly frustrating internet connection, which has been spotty ever since I moved into Girlfriend's old room.  As consequence, I’m not sure when this post will actually go up, but it’s too late for me to keep waiting for it tonight.