Steampunk Rap

Presenting "Cup of Brown Joy" from MC Elemental. Thanks to Sepiachord for turning me on to this.

A Pirate's Life For Me

A Pirate's Life For Me
Originally uploaded by Angus Blacksheep

Happy Talk like a Pirate day everyone!

Dungeons and Dragons Blog

As some readers may recall from an earlier post, I have started a first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game for my friends who have never played before.

To document the game development and my investigation in Dungeons and Dragons culture I have started a secondary blog: "Noob in the Dungeon". If any of my fellow dungeoneers want editing permission to contribute too, let me know.

Also, I will be using the twitter tag #noobDnD to flag related posts on my twitter feed.

See you in the dungeon.

Dragoncon steampunk meet up

Dragon con steampunk meet up
Originally uploaded by jaborwhalky.

The Alternate History Track at Dragoncon presents the "Official-Unofficial" Steampunk Meetup:

Hyatt Bar!
Friday the 4th, 7-9:30 PM

Songs to play at Dragoncon: Picard Song

Captain Jean-Luc Picard is really quite hypnotic.

Songs to play at Dragoncon

William Shatner tells us about Captain Kirk.

Ballad of G.I. Joe

The Ballad of G.I. Joe from Olivia Wilde

Great song with Julianne Moore, Henry Rollins, Alan Tudyk, and more.

Open Letter to DragonCon copy writer.

Dear Person responsible for writing the "New for 2009" page for DragonCon.org.

I am not one to complain about the hard work and effort people like yourself put into organizing an event as complicated and challenging as DragonCon. I know it is through your efforts that I get a fantastic party. However you should know that the "New for 2009" page, while a fantastic idea, fails in execution.

When this announcement page was first launched it was clear and informative. At a glance I knew that registration had moved to the Sheraton, and that the member badges were going to be made of a thicker material this year. But shortly thereafter, the page was re-written with all the clear facts hidden behind sloppy in-jokes, rambling stories and intentionally obstruficated 'leet' speak, all presented in Comic Sans. None of the these additions are necessary or helpful.

Which do you think is more clear and informative:

• "Let’s face it; it is really a walk between the Sheraton and the Hyatt. Google Maps lists it as a hike that takes the average person 10 minutes to walk. What Google does not take into account is that the Dragon*Con fan is not the average person. Do you think it would take a wookie carrying two heavy bags of memorabilia or an orc pushing a stroller 10 minutes? No, I think not. Well, you will be happy to know that we will have one of the Dragon*Con buses operation as a “local” shuttle between just the host hotels. And if you have forgotten, those would be the Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton, and Sheraton"

OR

• A Dragon*Con Shuttle bus will be running between the Hyatt, Mariott, Hilton and Sheraton hotels.

Some details involving operational hours and frequency would be good too, but such details may not have been known at the time. Simple, to-the-point facts are always appreciated. I'm sure no one ever read an informational announcement for an event and thought "What this really needs is Star Trek reference."

Also re-think your use of the font "Comic Sans." It is not really appropriate for clear, formal communication, and is best reserved for actual comic bubbles.

The barrage of near identical questions made to the convention planners in every forum, phone call and email must be exhausting, so having clear, centralized announcements is critical. Please consider taking the time to clean this page up to the standard set by other great pages on the DragonCon.org website.

Yours in fandom
DrHaggis

Bookend Sketches: Language

Some more bookend sketches I wish to share with you. Much humour comes from the absurdity and ironies of language, but these two sketches do it exceptionally well, and highlight why some comedians get into the art in the first place. The first sketch ties back to the RAF banter sketch too, for those keeping score.

Monty Python: Woody and Tinny Words


Fry and Laurie: On language


Previously on Slashboing

• Suggestive hardware store
• Suggestive Hospital
• Bookend Sketches: RAF Banter
• Bookend Sketches: Indian Food
  

Bookend Sketches: Indian Food

These two sketches tell a similar tale, though from different points of view. Brilliant stuff:
Rowan Atkinson: Guys after the Game


Goodness Gracious Me - Going for an English

Bookend Sketches: RAF Pilots

I do enjoy finding two different comedy sketches that 'bookend' well, due to similar themes and situations. Here are two sketches, 40 years apart that work great together.

Armstrong, Miller, Mitchell and Webb WWII Pilots (no embedding, sorry): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGp4DvFEgh8

Monty Python - Banter :

Bawdy 1970's Hospital

As a bit of a bookend to the sketch in the previous post here is a hospital sketch from Mitchell and Webb:

Suggestive Hardware terms

It's not just me who think hardware terms sound dirty, as evidenced by this lovely little sketch from Fry and Laurie.

Vintage Dungeons and Dragons Experiment

I have never played Dungeons and Dragons. That is a bit of a shameful confession in the geek community. I'm not totally unfamiliar with RPGs, as I have played some of the Palladium titles, like "Robotech" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". Also, I've played enough computer RPGs based on D&D to know the basic tropes. However, I've never been on a dungeon crawl armed only with a pencil, character sheet, a bag of dice and an imagination.

This is not a completely unheard of situation among my friends. Some of us wanted to play in our youth, but had no one to play with, or our parents outright disallowed it. Realizing a group of my friends were all are missing a core geek merit badge I thought a little project is called for.

I propose to my local friends that we acquire some vintage monster manuals and player handbooks, and start up a game of novices. Let us roll up some characters using the game rules we would have been playing with, had we all met as teens. We could either play it in self-imposed isolation, to simulate the pre-internet world we would have been playing in, or we can play it with a wry 21st century, Web 2.0 mind, blogging and twittering our experience.

I think it may be 3D6 of fun to play with other n00bs, and collectively decode a known obsolete and challenging rule system. This would be a Fall/Winter thing, so we have some time to think about it, pick a common release edition and get some books & dice. Who's with me?

Fake San Diego Comic-Con

If you are unable to attend an exciting convention, one can attend vicariously through the internet. Enough attendees twitter, flickr and blog and their experiences to give those at home a good feel for what they are missing. If you want to take a more active role while sitting on your couch (or behind a desk) you can attend the fake version of the convention.

After seeing fakesxsw posts from people who couldn't be at SXSW, I started up fakeSDCC, a stay-at-home shadow-con for San Diego Comic-con. Part convention satire, part larp, people are playing along, pretending their work desk is a guest signing table or posting about their clever memorabilia finds.

Play along on your blog or twitter, if you want, and I'll save you a seat in the Thundercats/Voltron crossover movie panel.

Twitter posts for FakeSDCC

You're doing it wrong, by popular demand

I have a new shirt available, emblazoned with the phrase "I don't know what you are doing, but you're doing it wrong". This is a common response from common critics, who don't even have to know what you are trying to accomplish before they declare your failure at it.

52 Weeks of Video

I have started another year-long project on flickr. For a whole year (September 2006-2007), I took a daily self-portrait for the 365 Days project. This was a great experience, though daunting. I attempted to slow things down in 2008, and started taking a weekly self-portrait for the 52 Weeks project, though somehow this proved more difficult than the daily photograph.

Time has passed and I was itching for a new project, when I was invited to the 52 Weeks of Video project. Since Flickr started accepting short videos, there has been much controversy, but more importantly, there has been much creativity from the users. This new weekly video group was just what I needed to keep me creative and busy with my camera.

This is what I put together from a toga party yesterday:



If you want to follow along, my video set can be viewed here.

Previously on Slashboing

• Start of 365 Days
• Start of 52 Weeks
  

The Musical Ride

Happy Canada Day! Here is some of the better footage I could find of the RCMP Musical Ride. Drink it in.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Television: Trends and Longevity

There seems to be a significant increase in the amount of science fiction and fantasy (SF&F) programs on television. It feels that the premise of every new show had some fantasy, supernatural or 'fictional science' element behind it. "We won!" was my initial geek response. Then I had a nagging doubt. Is this a sampling error or bias on my part? Did I think this because I was looking for such a result, or was there an actual trend in prime time television? Truly a more scientific survey had to be taken.

Hypothesis
These are the questions I seek to answer:

"Are there more SF&F shows on now than in past years?"
"What is the longevity of a typical SF&F program?"
"What factors govern the amount and longevity of SF&F prime time programs?"

Methodology and Bias
I found that Wikipedia had a great collection of almanac articles that detailed the prime time lineup of every television network since 1946. I scoured the listings and attempted to catalogue every "North American prime time show whose premise was based on supernatural, fantasy, or science fiction elements." I endeavoured to have a consistent methodology that would mitigate sample bias.

As the programming trends in other countries and markets are quite different, and my focus was on North American television culture, most BBC and ITV shows were not on the list, unless I could find evidence of broad prime-time American syndication. Nor did I count Saturday morning kids shows and cartoons as they almost always contain fantasy elements and it would skew the data.

Also, there is more documentation available for more recent shows, so there is some accuracy biases between the years.

I logged the number of episodes produced, when known, rather than the number episodes aired. I did not include any "made for TV" movies or mini-series' as this was difficult to track consistently, and would bias the data to shorter runs.

I did not count shows that may have introduced a fantasy element late in its run, because that was not its primary premise, and again there would be a bias toward later shows that I have actually seen, and could identify this change. Though if it is documented that bulk of the episodes produced did have a sci-fi or fantasy element, despite some retooling, the show was added to the list.

Shows with a religious premise, involving Judeo–Christian elements such as angels and demons, may be included among the supernatural programs, if the cosmology presented was typically unique, and differed from established dogmas, which is most often the case.

Data and Results
I have identified 232 television shows that meet these conditions and criteria. Some minor trivia from my search: The first SF&F show was "Captain Video and His Video Rangers" from the Dumont Network in 1949. The oldest running SF&F program is Smallville, which started in 2001. The single series with the most episodes Bewitched with 254.

The raw data can be viewed on Google Docs, and I encourage any reviews, suggestion or further analysis of my data.

To answer my first question, I created the following graph showing the number of SF&S shows that debut in each television year, starting in September:

This graph shows a marked upward trend, indicating that, for the most part, more new SF&S shows debut every year. The 2007-2008 season brought 13 new shows, and 2008-2009 saw 14 new shows, the highest number of shows in my sample. But some recent years only posted a modest 3 or 4 new shows comparable to the volumes found in the late seventies or early nineties. A slight sinusoid can be seen with spikes at ten-year intervals, however more rigorous statistical calculations have not yet been done. But for there to be more new shows, it old shows must be cancelled.

The average longevity of these shows is estimated with arithmetic mean of 44.96, corresponding to an average of two, 22 episode seasons, which is a typical "full season". The median, or centre value is 22 episodes and the mode, is 13 episodes. Long running standouts such as Star Trek and Stargate, bring the average up, while the bulk of SF&F shows survive for only one season, as 14 is a typical "first order" of episodes before renewing for the rest of the season.

To see if SF&F shows typically get longer or shorter runs than police procedurals, westerns, medical dramas, or sit-coms, I would have to accumulate comprehensive data on those shows. However random sampling of non SF&F shows, which I had to take in order to determine their genre, indicates that most modern shows don't make it out of their first season alive. In the 70's and 80's, even if a show was tanking in the ratings, it would typically get all episodes aired, and then not renewed. In the last few years, the trend is to order fewer episodes up front, then pull shows after 3-5 episodes if ratings disappoint. Gone is the September season start, with mid-season replacements debuting throughout the year. In fact, a good portion of the shows announced for the 2009-2010 are already primed as mid-season replacements for shows that have yet to be cancelled.

I found some obvious-if-you-think-about-it trends regarding the kind of environment that creates more genre programming. For one, more broadcast channels are good for SF&F programming. When Fox started a national broadcasting schedule in 1987, there is a spike in the number of recorded programs, and the same can be seen when UPN and WB started in 1997. Likely more channels means more of every kind of programming, but importantly for this study, and fandom, SF&F was not overlooked by new general themed channels.

The history and trends in syndicated shows is not fully clear to me, but one can say that syndication is generally good for SF&F programming. Since syndication means that the initial financial burden is taken by a production company, the broadcaster can try out new shows with reduced risk. This leads a varied array of programming including, more often than not, SF&F.

Another big conclusion one can draw from this data is that Firefly, with only 14 episodes, is not an anomalously cancelled show, rather it has the longevity of a typical show in this data set. Its cancellation was not atypical of shows from that era, with none of the scripted shows debuting in that same year lasting until the current season.

If this survey suggests anything to those who love science fiction and fantasy programming on television, it is this: Treat every new episode of your beloved show as if it were the last, because history shows it may very well be. When your show ends, another one will come along soon.

John Hodgman's Nerd toast of Obama

Full of great sci-fi references and insightful comparisons, John Hodgman gave a great speech at the Radio and Television Corespondents dinner last night.



Dune quiz Answers:
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