How To Spot A Psychopath

DVD Jon’s new application DoubleTwist looks completely awesome. I don’t think it really does anything that you couldn’t do before with umpteen tweaky utilities, but it aims to do it all in one simple program.

So I was all ready to download the beta and start freeing all of my DRM-ed media files from their corporate shackles… when I suddenly remembered that I don’t have any DRM-ed media files.

I’ve got some DVDs, but they seem pretty happy where they are.

If you’ve got audio, video or even photos (on a stupid locked-down cameraphone, for instance) that you’d like to move somewhere else but can’t, though, check DoubleTwist out.

DivX’s new Stage6 site will host, for free, pretty much any legal DivX-encoded content you like, with much better quality than GooTube.

Stage6 video files are of course generally much bigger, and you need to install their special player extension, and the site still seems to have that occasional GooTube problem where you upload a video and then it never goes live.

But I consider this a small price to pay to be able to watch (and download!) stuff like A Gentlemen’s Duel and Team Roomba’s hilarious instalments one and two of their TF2 griefing, in decent resolution.

(Unlike many other video hosting services, Stage6 does not have interstitial ads, or weird code that only works right on Internet Explorer. Actually, the current FAQ notes that “The Stage6 beta website is optimized for experience in the Mozilla Firefox browser. It may kind of work in IE as well.”)

As a test, I’ve uploaded my battling robot bugs video from the other day to Stage6; it’s here. I think the stereo audio improves it considerably.

(Joey, the Amazing Fetching Cat may now also be enjoyed in higher resolution and stereo on Stage6. He’s here.)

I’ve just finished watching the first, and only, series of the inventively-named “Blade: The Series“.

The show’s cancellation after 12 episodes was a lot less of a crime than the cancellation of Firefly, but I still quite enjoyed it. The feeling of foreboding you get when some rapper with a silly name gets cast in a nominally serious show is, in this case, unfounded. Blade is an absolutely relentless downer who avoids anything resembling dramatic acting at all costs, after all. He’s easy enough for any schmuck to play.

Blade: The Series often doesn’t quite make sense. You’d think, for instance, that the shutters on the windows of Vampire HQ would have anti-daylight interlocks that couldn’t be defeated by anything short of a shaped charge, but apparently they prefer to give the good guys a sporting chance. And vampires are supposed to have superhuman senses, yet none of them ever seem to overhear anything, or even be able to smell a sweaty, bleeding human who seconds ago crossed their path, when to do so would be inconvenient for the plot.

The upper levels of the vampire hierarchy also appear to be reserved for the exceedingly pompous, but there’s nothing new about soliloquising expository villains. And there’s a good laugh based on this in the last episode.

The low-ish budget also shows through from time to time. When, late in the series, it becomes apparent that something important will be happening in Toronto, you can’t help but laugh. The show’s meant to be set in Detroit, a mere hop skip and jump from Toronto - but I live on the other side of the planet and could still see that everyone’s actually been Rumbling in Vancouver all this time. So now Blade would appear to have to drive his Cool Car 2700 miles.

Oh, and in the Drinking Game for this series, “someone walks somewhere in slow motion” would only be one very small sip of your drink, and “someone who is actually still alive is confidently declared to be dead by someone who hasn’t even checked” would not be very much bigger.

(I was also downright surprised when a vampire told a human employee “your well-deserved reward awaits you” and it turned out that, for once, the reward was not death.)

But the acting’s pretty decent, the fight choreography is OK, and nobody decided to cut the guts out of the show by shooting for a PG-13 rating.

If you haven’t seen the Blade series but you also haven’t seen Ultraviolet (the British TV series, not the lousy movie), you should see Ultraviolet first.

If you’ve still got a hankering for vampire-based fun after that, check out Blade: The Series‘ movie-length pilot and see what you think.

A while ago, it came to my attention that there are people in the world who have not seen They Live.

This is understandable. They Live can sneak past you. It looks as if it ought to be a really, really terrible movie.

I mean, Roddy Piper is the 80’s sci-fi leading man you hire when you can’t afford Kurt Russell. And They Live shows on TV in terrible-movie timeslots. And a precis of the plot could easily leave you with the conclusion that the movie is just a Twilight Zone episode padded out to ninety minutes.

And a lot of its fans only seem to remember the big fight scene, and a quote involving bubble gum.

But They Live is actually pretty freakin’ awesome. If you have not seen it, I really must insist that you do.

This subject came up on the excellent, though not terribly well confined to its stated purpose, Skeptic discussion list. Someone mentioned that if you like one sci-fi B movie with Roddy Piper in it, you’d better see another - namely, Hell Comes To Frogtown.

I have now seen that second film.

At first glance, Frogtown appears to have all of the same problems as They Live.

And at second, third and all subsequent glances… it still does. It’s terrible. But quite funny.

Frogtown also continues the sterling reputation of the amazingly popular Vasquez Rocks shooting location. If you visit Vasquez Rocks and don’t see a starship’s away team and/or someone having an unconvincing fistfight with a man in a reptile suit, I think you may justifiably demand monetary compensation from the government.

I think I may manage to survive without seeing Frogtown’s several inexplicable sequels, though. This despite the fact that, in the first sequel, the Roddy Piper role is reprised by the inimitable - and I use the word advisedly - Robert Z’Dar.

A new, better-than-ever opportunity to watch Tim ‘n’ Rex’s outstanding Secret Life Of Machines (previously mentioned here and here) has arrived:

The Exploratorium science museum has made every single episode available for straightforward download from their site!

[UPDATE: Or, at least, they did. There was unexpected demand, so they took the files down again. Their Webmaster quietly reinstated them a different location for a while, but then word got out and he took ‘em away agin. Never mind, though: I got them all, and made a torrent!]

There are QuickTime streaming versions which seem to be broken at the moment, but never mind those - the ones you want are the “iPhone” versions. They’re standard iPhone video format (480 by 360 pixel, MPEG4 video, 128 kilobit AAC audio, M4V container), which is playable on PCs without much messing around. If you don’t happen to have the right codecs and don’t want to faff about installing QuickTime or something, just play ‘em with the all-in-one VLC media player.

(The iPhone format is also 30 frames per second, not the 15fps of the old iPod Video format.)

I presume these rips are from the DVD edition, because they look a lot nicer than the VHS rips that’ve been doing the rounds before now. And they’re less than 192Mb per episode, so all 18 episodes will fit with room to spare on one DVD-R.

I’m happy to say that I have now contributed an article to that supreme productivity-reducer, the TV Tropes wiki.

I’ve done little edits there in the past, but never had the chance to create an article. But a couple of days ago I noticed that they didn’t have an article on one of the staples of sci-fi TV and movies: The Ridiculously Dense Asteroid Field.

So I made one. It’s already been considerably improved by other users.

…make it Code Guardian, from Cee-Gee (who’re Italian, hence odd voice acting). Their download server is currently a melted lump, but there are mirrors.

Someone on the Metafilter thread about this video wondered where the British robot was.

Personally, I want to see the Soviet one, stonewalling the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, long since out of ammo for all eight guns and just pounding on Panthers with a length of I-beam.

Herewith, some outstanding video clips (as in, not a whole series of something) that everybody linked to when they were new and exciting (years ago, in one case).

But you, gentle reader, may have missed out on one or more of them. So I don’t feel too guilty about this Outside-Scoop blog post.

The title links go to the pages where you can find the big full-resolution versions of each for download.

Big Brother State:

Buggy Saints Row: The Musical:

Mercury Joe:

Rockfish (soon to be a major motion picture!):

I cannot recall previously encountering a game promo video that used one of the famous “In A World” voiceover artists.

The reason for that is pretty simple, of course. Don LaFontaine and/or Hal Douglas (I’m not enough of an expert to be able to tell them apart) are expensive, and most games cannot even pretend to have enough gravitas to justify one of those Overblown Voice-Overs.

OK, sure, maybe an RPG or a big-ass space shooter could pull it off, but this is “MotorStorm“, which doesn’t even appear to have guns in it. It’s just a very pretty off-road racing game for the PS3.

But, nonetheless, it would appear that “In this ageless valley, a new breed of warrior has been born.” Et cetera.

Don and Hal have done better work.

On the off-chance that you haven’t seen it, here’s Don and everybody else who’s anybody in the movie trailer voice industry except Hal:

And here’s Hal:

I didn’t have the faintest idea that someone was making a (live action) TV version of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. But they were, and they have, and it just screened on Sky One in the UK. Dunno when it’ll make it to other parts of the world. Those of us with little patience can, of course, find it for download in the usual hives of scum and villainy.

Good points: Effects more than good enough. Most acting fine. Stuff that’ll severely bother small children and delight larger ones all intact. Three hours long (different sites have different estimates, but without ads, it’s three hours), so it doesn’t rush through the story. And, despite that, there’s little spoon-feeding, yet people who’ve never read a Discworld book should be only mildly puzzled.

Also, “Ian Richardson as the Voice of Death” is a good thing to have in the credits for any show. Imagine what it’d do for The Bold and the Beautiful.

Bad points: Susan Sto Helit played by attractive piece of wood. Mr Teatime played by British actor doing strange American accent for no obvious reason, beyond the director’s warped desire to have Scorpio from Dirty Harry in his film. Not the quickest-moving story in the world, but better some slow scenes than everything mashed into 75 minutes, if you ask me.

Given the hideous violence that a TV movie could do to a Pratchett book (and Hogfather’s one of the better ones, too), this is an excellent result. Four stars.

(See also: The animated version of Soul Music, which I’ve now watched enough of to be quite sure that it’s not nearly as good as Hogfather. Christopher Lee as Death’s voice is even better than Ian Richardson, but most of the actual book dialogue is gone, and that kills the whole thing for me just by itself. I keep thinking I’m watching Masters of the Universe In Discworld, or something.)