Rubénerd!

According to TodayOnline (and they would know... right?) The Simpsons may potentially be getting the can after 23 years. As a reporter asked Krusty during one of his many retirement press conferences "Why now? Why not [years] ago?"

I was saying Boo Earns

The Simpsons is one of the defining television shows of our generation. People hundreds of years from now will be studying it to learn about pop culture, societal attitudes and humour of the 1990s and 2000s. Phrases such as d'oh! have entered our lexicon. Practically everyone in their 20s in the English speaking world (and a substantial number outside it) know all the characters, can spout random lines from episodes ad nauseum, or at the very least have watched it. I'd hazard a guess that Homer Simpson is more well known than most politicians, and certainly as much as any celebrity.

I saw my first episode when my family had a brief stint living in Brisbane in the mid 1990s. I was too young to understand many of the jokes, but the show still appealed to me, despite the episode being about American football of all things! My favourite character instantly became Kent Brockman; hearing what he had to say in an authoritative news voice cracked me up far too much! I attribute the series to my fascination with voices, an interest that landed my sister and I our first paid jobs at Discovery Channel Asia as voice-over actors.

Even now in my mid 20s, the Simpsons is one of the few television programmes I watch on a regular basis, often times even older episodes I've seen hundreds, possibly trillions, of times before. The episodes have a timeless quality and a way to make me smile that very few things do. I still quote them even now!

Nacho nacho man!

Normally I don't agree with the consensus of the general public when it comes to media (though I was doing this before the hipsters! Oh, wait...), but I'll be blunt when I say the last couple of seasons have been virtually unwatachable. Once heartwarming, biting and hilarious, the show's decline in quality has been observable to all but apparently the show's PR folk.

The financial struggles of the working class were eschewed (gesundheit) for zanier plots that had more potential for jokes, but detracted from the believability that made the show unique.

The move to high definition and the further saturation reminded me of Lisa's statement to Randal Kurtis "Better effects don't make for better storytelling".

The movie was mildly funny, though could have just been an episode.

I could go on, but as with the episodes themselves, you've probably already seen these arguments listed thousands of times. All I'll add is: I have fond memories of growing up with The Simpsons, but perhaps it really is time to move on. I'll miss its reassuring presence, if not its later story lines.

Smell you later with Dr Farnsworth's Smell-o-scope, assuming you don't settle this "pay" dispute. Thank you for all the entertainment, laughs and good times :)

If this was just a PR move to generate free press and to reinvigorate public support for the show... touché.

Almost none of the Emmy-nominated shows are viewable on Internet-based TV services ~ Peter Cashmore, Mashable

BitTorrent. As I said in my recent DVD post, if you don't give people the choice to get your media online, people will find their own ways.

After skipping Saturday for personal reasons, yesterday I went to day two of Supanova Sydney 2011, the first ever sci-fi and anime convention I've been to in Australia!

As you'll read below, my D60 battery was shot, but I was able to at least get that photo above... click to zoom in and see all the stalls and people ^_^. And watch me attempt to make up for it with several terrible and pointless photos below!

Live long and prosper

Supanova Sydney 2011 was spread out over the Dome building in Olympic Park, the sprawling city within a city in Sydney that looks eerily similar to Putrajaya. When my terribly awesome sister and I noticed not one but two Hatsune Mikus attempting to jaywalk in the strong wind while holding down their skirts and trying not to trip over their bright teal hair, we knew we were getting close!

Inside the dome was row after row of absolute nerdishness in stalls, from Marvel and DC comics, Dr Who, Star Trek and Wars, Dr Who, Serenity and Firefly, Dr Who, and tables of players of Dungeons and Dragons and Magic The Gathering. Punctured between these stalls were more stalls for Dr Who, and anime and manga. I think I even saw a few Dr Who stalls.

For someone who often feels isolated for nerdishness, it can't be overstated just how wonderful it felt to hear people talk about which Magic deck colours were their favourites, how silly Kirk's two deaths were, and how cute and/or awesome character XYZ from series ABC that I recognised was!

#EpicFail

Despite a last ditch attempt to get my Nikon D60 battery re-jiggered with a week of being plugged in, the dang thing barely held enough charge to take a few photos before dying. We got just enough juice to take some blurry photos of the Q and A (qanda for the Twitter folk) with Tom Felton, the terribly attractive and friendly portrayer of Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, and of the dome building from the second floor you saw above.

This was most tragic, for there were some absolutely stunning cosplayers! As I eluded to above, there were a fair share of eerily good David Tennant Doctors walking around and a fair share of Star Wars characters and Starfleet officers, but also so many anime cosplayers which were just as good if not better than any I saw when I was in Singapore! There was an even mix of Caucasian and Asian people getting involved, some of the best seifuku wearers were Aussies, go figure!

I kept my spending in check given I'll be going to SMASH (the Sydney Manga Anime Show) next month, but I still was able to pick up a few figs of Mugi, Yoko from her Sweet Stars music video and Donkey Kong... for $35! We just started playing our Wii again and I'm always that character you see ;). My sister picked up more handmade rings and badges than she could ever wear, and the stall owners were super friendly and helpful.

I was told by friends from Canberra we met up with that the crowds were insane on the first day and that it was their biggest turnout yet! Compared to the conventions I'd been to in Singapore Supanova felt tiny, but there was enough to see and do that my feet were aching by the end, and there wasn't any shortage of enthusiasm or wares to spent [needlessly] large amounts of money on!

Group hug!

One observation my sister and I made was just how polite and nice everyone was. It was crowded enough that we were bumping into people regularly, but every single person apologised! The owners of the stalls, the volunteers checking wristbands and making sure queues for events were kept in check, everyone was just lovely.

In a scene reminiscent of the Revenge of The Nerds, Olympic Park was also hosting an NRL event to coincide with Supanova. My sister made the observation that after all these guys in their Harry Potter costumes and the girls in their (granted fairly skimpy) cosplay outfits were able to walk around with each other with impunity inside, it wasn't until the drunk rugby fans saw them that we heard jeers and cat calls. She claims the jocks were just stunned and jealous that the nerds have cuter/hotter friends ;).

One thing I would add, the sight of the sports fans in their team colours walking alongside the cosplayers and nerds as we all headed to the train station and car parks was surreal!

Some lessons learned for SMASH

Overall an amazing experience, though I'll remember to withdraw fundage BEFORE going to the event, and I'll make certain I have a working camera battery this time! The fact I didn't have one for this was more tragic than the times I watched Star Wars I, II and III and couldn't get my money or time back. I'll have some serious catching up to do :).

In conclusion, as I wrote on Twitter:

Girls dressed as Miku and Sailor Moon in front of the carriage, people playing Magic Cards in the back. This train is made of win XD

Marge: Why are you frosting that old throw pillow?
Homer: I... could ask you the very same question!

I really don't understand why there's so much Fox News satire out there, they do a good enough job of humiliating themselves without any outside help.

Is it screenshot or screencap?

That screencap above was from Glenn Beck who claimed Egypt was in New York State. Well okay he didn't say that, he actually said "New York is about the size of Egypt". No joke.

Now, I love maps. As a kid my parents used to buy me atlases and globes and wall maps for birthdays and other celebrations that involved the capitalistic exchange of gifts. I was obsessed with them. I still am. I often wonder to myself had I not got into computer science or if I were born before the age of electronics that perhaps I would have tried my hand at cartography. What a deeply fascinating field! I'd probably have to go outside to do that though. Hmm, spanner in the works.

That said, it doesn't take someone with relatively intimate global geographic knowledge to know New York State is nowhere close to being the size of Egypt, not in population and certainly not in land area. My sister is knowledgeable in other fields and never really caught the geography-interest bug, but even she laughed out loud when I told her about this.

This is a big, big gaffe

A quick check on Wolfram Alpha returned these results:

New York State	122,283 square kilometres 47,214 square miles	19.38 million people
Egypt	995,450 square kilometres 384,345 square miles	84.47 million people

That's right, New York State is only a fraction larger than 12% the size of Egypt. That's not even close!

(122,283 / 995,450) * 100 = 12.28 (4SF)

Am I splitting hairs about this?

Perhaps, but Mr Beck is an anchor of a television programme on an alleged news network watched by millions, most of whom I imagine never question anything he says. If Glenn tells me that Egypt and New York are "about the same size", then it must be true!

Even if he were reading from a script (I don't know, I don't watch his show), the common sense part of his brain should have alerted him to this obvious absurdity of what he had to say, and he would have corrected it on the spot. Which leads us to two inevitable conclusions: either he made a slip of the tongue and didn't notice (unlikely given he had a graphic created to demonstrate his point), or he's as breathtakingly ignorant and knows as much about Egypt as his host network.

If you haven't seen these already, Fox News in the US has run this same map of the Middle East twice now:

I end this post the way I started it. I really don't understand why there's so much Fox News satire out there, they do a good enough job of humiliating themselves without any outside help.

Thanks to Firedoglake and Media Matters for America for the screenshots, or screencaps, or whatever they are.

Jaw, meet floor. To be fair to Fox News, at least they had one dissenting panelist who scoffed at the idea that oil was just in a "few isolated patches", and that nature could take care of it. Frankly, the moment Brit asked "Where's the oil?" I would have informed him it's in his skull, where his brain should be.

I post this because Singapore is dealing with its own oil spill now too. Obviously its an order of magnitude smaller than what BP managed to do in the US, but given Singapore is barely the size of a country town in land area the effects are being felt all over the place. The smell, mostly :P.

For those of you who didn't read my tweets from earlier this year, on new year's day I vowed to not watch television for an entire year. It turns out to have been far simpler than I thought it would be :).

Of course, notice my phrasing, I didn't say "television shows" I said "television". The idea of waiting around for someone else's schedule to watch programming has seemed weird and foreign to me for many years, here I'm just taking it a step further. My iPhone and laptops are my televisions now. No TV tuner though, all of it is from internet sources.

I'm a bit less angry now

The first thing I noticed was I'm less angry in the evenings. I have an insatiable appetite for news, it's why I unsubscribed to a bunch of wire services on Google Reader and later retired it for Twitter. I hate being kept out of the loop. If someone took away my internet access today, news would absolutely be the number 1 thing I would miss.

As I'm sure is the case in many places, the news on commercial television in Australia is terrible. Even if there was a major humanitarian disaster somewhere or a new scientific discovery, almost without question the first 10 minutes are about mundane local affairs, followed by a token amount for business, then the rest is entirely dedicated to painfully detailed sport analysis. I admit I find the whole idea of most sports to be terribly dull, pointless and uninteresting, but in Adelaide they have to analyse AFL, a primitive contact sport nobody else in the world even plays.

Then don't get me started on the tabloid news programmes. A Current Affair and Today Tonight represent the absolute dregs of media reporting in Australia, but often they would have at least one story I'd be marginally interested in so I'd find myself watching them. ACA and TT are like poisons, there's no safe dosage.

I cut these shows entirely out of my diet, and I'm a happier person.

Not limited to time and place

Less than five years ago if you didn't watch television you were pretty limited online, but thesedays with podcasting and legal media downloads (cough) I'm spoilt for choice. Not only that, but I can choose where and when I watch media, for example I've made it a habit of watching Media Watch on Tuesday mornings on the train. It's a ton of fun :).

At some point I'll write up all the video shows I download. It's as if I have my own personal television network!

Watching an old episode of Penn and Teller Bullshit last night on how some people claim swearing is "destroying society", I briefly noticed this sign in the office of one of the proponents.

What's wrong with nerds!? Are we too sarcastic perhaps? I'm never sarcastic.

For those not in the know, nerds (as in Ruben-nerd) are geeks without social skills. Perhaps she's just afraid of us then.

I don't believe in synchronicities to the extent where two spookily related things are purposefully crashed into each other with some form of supreme power for my own bewilderment and amazement, but what I do know is coincidences scare the begeebuses out of me, if begeebuses were something tangible and they were previously inside of me. I think I'll stop that imagery right there.

In this case the TV tuner in my Mac was blaring out the sound of David O'Doherty performing at the Melbourne Comedy Festival during his 20 things that piss him off from 2009 or something segment, and just as I arrived home he arrived at Twitter on his list:

"Twitter!"
I have no idea what the point of Twitter is. It's like an idiot megaphone shouting out benalitites of your own life. I made an omelette today. Oh really, who cares, your only friends are sitting at their computers.

I listened to some of the other things on his list (blue lights under car chassis, stupid government advisory ads that don't do anything!) that generated laughter and applause from the audience, but I thought it was interesting that his Twitter jab fell completely flat.

It was so quiet you could hear a punchline drop

Did it fall flat because there were so many people on Twitter as they were watching the performance? Hah, I'm not that deluded :). But I do have a theory!

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of vacuous, inane, self absorbed people on Twitter and I poke fun at them all the time myself (TMZ lolz!) but poking fun at all of Twitter by saying its just people talking about grilled cheese sandwiches just isn't funny. Not because it may or may not be true, but because that gem of a witty barb has been used, reused, recycled, twisted around, refitted for new clothes and spat out by every single half baked comedian who's waved a mouse at a computer screen for five minutes, scratched their head and has been given a microphone since the service started!

It's only observational comedy when you joke about something that hasn't already been observed by thousands of other people already. What's next, a joke about Britney Spears or aeroplane food? Come on David, less of this predictable, boring stuff and more Very Mild Superpowers, at least with that routine I was able to chuckle once.

New way to connect with fans? Nah!

I know he was only doing it to get some laughs, but it also really surprises me that someone in his position isn't checking out Twitter at all. If he doesn't get it that's fine, there are plenty of independent artists like the awesome Marian Call and even the illustriously fabulous Stephen Fry who have seemingly figured out how to connect with fans by typing 140 character messages.

I know, it's Earth shattering stuff... as George W. Bush would say, you'd have to be one of them rocket surgeons to get that!

As a matter of disclosure, I am a Twitter user, but I'd have probably had the same second hand embarrassment if he'd made the same kind of worn out joke about MySpace.

"MySpace!"
I have no idea what the point of MySpace is. It's like the back page of a seedy magazine offering suggestive services under innocent sounding names. Hi, my name is Sunshine. Oh really, what do you really do?

Haven't you overreacted?

Of course! But that's the great thing about having a website like this, nobody was forced to pay for any of my material here before they read it ;).

Sorry, but have you got one with a lower ceiling?