Ever since I started using Last.fm, I’ve been looking for similar services for other forms of media I intake. Goodreads was an excellent find, providing a lot of similar features geared toward books. It’s fun to integrate “what I’m doing” type lists into my website, but more than that the two services have generated some interesting data on what I like the most. They’ve also led me to new artists and authors I’ve enjoyed, primarily by allowing me to see what my friends have been up to.

I’d been casually looking for a similar service applied to movies. My friend found Flixter a few years back, but the site design was too much like MySpace (think garish multicolor backgrounds). Recently, I noticed XBMC had a plugin for a service called trakt.tv that scrobbles the movies and TV shows you watch in XBMC to the site, Last.fm style.

It’s still in the early stages, so there aren’t a lot of integrations to other services, and you can only add watched items manually or through XBMC. However, I’ve been pleased with it so far: The site is very simple, listing what you’ve watched and enploying a binary love/hate rating system. While it would be a lot more useful to a wider audience if it could submit from non-XBMC players, it’s certainly the best service of its kind I’ve seen so far with a lot of potential.

Setting up XBMC
I decided to go with XBMC (release 10, Dharma), the dominant player for homebrew HTPC setups – and for good reason. It’s got a slick interface that it pads with data and images retrieved from fan-curated databases of movies and TV shows. While you can use a live installation to run it without an operating system, I opted to install it on Windows 7 so I could easily transfer files to the computer over my network. While you can access a full-featured administrator account on the computer, I set up the computer to automatically boot into a special XBMC account that has XBMC replacing the normal Explorer shell. The visual part of Windows doesn’t load at all unless explorer.exe is explicitly run, and I don’t even have to use additional software – just the Group Policy Editor in Windows (the link has step-by-step instructions for doing this yourself).

Customization
I decided to use the popular Aeon65 skin instead of the default Confluence, largely because of the gorgeous horizontal menu configurations. I have a wireless keyboard functioning as an advanced remote (and for working with the computer when necessary), but my phone is quickly becoming my primary remote, with the official XBMC remote app controlling my setup over WiFi from anywhere in the house. The official instructions for setting this up were a bit out of date; this tutorial has updated steps and screenshots using newer versions of everything. I also made sure I set up Zoe to get a static IP address from the router so my phone would always know where to look for her.

XBMC in action
I went through and took a few screenshots of my setup in action. Thus far XBMC has been superb at picking out the correct information and images for my TV shows and movies, with a bit less robust results for music. I’m able to do a slick visual browse through my various media types, with icons in the bottom for the format, studio, and resolution. I can also get detailed info on the film or show, including cast members (you can also search your media by actor or studio). Fanart and posters help make everything look visually pleasing and well put-together, and the best part is that it does all this automatically – none of the time-consuming curation I’ve grown accustomed to with my iTunes music library. There are a few outstanding issues: I’m like to get movies in a series with unique names (i.e. Harry Potter) to appear sequentially instead of alphabetically, I want to see it correctly remove musical artists only featured in compilation albums from the browsing list, and I want to see if there’s a way to get all the album art I’ve painstakingly added to my iTunes library into the XBMC database (or find a database with more artwork than Last.fm). All in all I’ve been quite impressed with how this has worked out, and while it took a bit of learning, it’s made viewing media at my house much cooler and easier to use. Now I just need a surround sound system, and maybe a bigger screen…

With an army of rabidly loyal fans at his command and a good number of people enthusiastically backing up his creative efforts, Whedon is in a good place to ditch the film “industry” entirely and market his work directly to fans. He’s already proved he can do it with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, releasing the shows for free online while selling them through iTunes and with extras on physical DVDs. Unfortunately the shows aren’t still online via the main site, a move that only discourages potential fans from becoming interested.

He’s only scratched the surface of what’s possible. Using a tiered support model, his team could offer anything from signed physical copies of shows and tie-in merchandise to time with the actors or old set props. Many in his audience would devour such offerings as though it were a final meal.

In addition, he gains the creative freedom to tell his stories the way he wants to, unfettered by preposterous demands of stodgy network executives seeking meaningless ratings increases. Money received from fans also goes directly to those involved in creating the art they enjoy.

As for the Dollhouse story, what an ending. The ear-mounted imprinting devices reminded me of Neuromancer, with Ambrose and Harding swapping “suits” much like the sleeves in Altered Carbon. The only major gripe I have is with Boyd Langton. His Master Plan was seriously to allow the world to be destroyed so he and his handpicked favorites could rule over it? To what end? The lord of a billion mindless slaves doesn’t have much of a swagger.

Honestly, it had the same level of ridiculousness as one of Lex Luthor’s inane schemes, blowing up the California coast or creating a new landmass so he can…sell waterfront property. It seemed much more likely to me that Rossum would cause the tech to get loose through a wanton pursuit of profits. Making Boyd insane or stupid didn’t seem like the best story path to take.

On a more minor note, a massive pulse that “resets” everybody back to how they were? I was under the impression that the imprinting process made essentially permanent changes, hence the data backups. What happened suggests more of an overlay that can be removed to reveal the original person underneath, seemingly in conflict with previous statements.

The show got off to a tediously slow start, but I think Dollhouse had a smashing second season. It’s a shame that once again a show gets shut down midstream just as it begins taking off.

To me, seeing the show’s characters again was like visiting old friends, and I got sad all over again when the adventure concluded. Interestingly, Rachel told me that it was the theme song that initially put her off to the show. As soon as she heard the opening phrases she thought, “This is stupid.” If she hadn’t persisted for my sake, she would have completely written it off.

After basking in the testament to her love for me (awww), I began to wonder how many others had a similar objection. The show was very character-driven, so if a potential viewer had ditched the show at the beginning thanks to the song,  they would likely have had a difficult time connecting to the characters at a later stage.

Firefly – Main Title by Greg Edmonson
Download now or listen on posterous

01 Firefly – Main Title.mp3 (1767 KB)

Dollhouse recently got handed a similar fate. I suppose that if these kinds of shows can’t grab an audience right from the beginning, they’re doomed. All the more reason to ditch network TV.

Posted via email from Michael’s posterous

The past couple of episodes have been following Dr. Chase’s decision to fake a test result to passive-aggressively kill an evil dictator, most likely averting a genocide the latter had planned. Chase is plagued by the murder and visits a priest seeking absolution. The priest tells him the only way to atone for his sin is to turn himself in, presumably meaning that he will lose his ability to practice as a doctor, not to mention his personal freedom.

This has set me thinking: Is there ever a time when a rational person can kill another and not feel bad about it? In superhero movies like Batman they often avoid this question by having the bad guy accidently step off a bridge or kill himself in some way, but what if that didn’t happen? Would it be okay to not incarcerate but actually end the life of “bad” people? It would sure solve a lot of problems at Arkham Asylum.

I’m not sure what the answer to this question is. It seems to me that if you believe killing the other person was the right thing to do, as Chase did, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. In the show, thousands of lives were most likely saved by the one death. Chase must take personal responsibility for his actions, but I don’t think he should have to essentially end his own life to do so by officially confessing to murder. He did break the law, and if caught, accept full responsibility, but he shouldn’t have to make it easy to get caught.

Killing obviously should never be taken lightly, but in some cases it seems like it is the right choice.

Simply putting effort into something is not sufficient reason to reap any kind of external reward, especially financial compensation. Most of us have had an experience where we worked hard on something but received little to no acknowledgment from others. A personal example: As a kid, my family was part of an organic food co-op that involved delivery and pickup of the food from our garage on certain months. A few days before one of these pickups, I had learned how to make origami rabbits from Highlights magazine. In preparation, I proceeded to make dozes of these rabbits on neon-colored paper and set them out on a table for our visitors. They could have one of their own for only 25 cents!

Needless to say, I didn’t get many customers. Aside from making a kid feel better, why would anybody want a simple paper rabbit? Even if somebody did, it would be easy enough for them to figure out how to make one of their own. At the end of the day, one person, a mother, gave me a few dollars and took all of them, giving them to her young daughter to play with in the backseat. The key here is that it wasn’t the effort I put into making the rabbits that gave them value, it was how much value the customer perceieved they had. To most of the potential customers, the rabbits were useless pieces of garishly-colored paper, but to one, it was an inexpensive way to entertain her child during the drive home.

What artists produce has no value whatsoever, except what a potential customer assigns to it. The artist Vincent van Gogh was hardly wealthy during his lifetime; his work didn’t achieve global renown until twenty years after his death. Now, his original works have fetched some of the highest prices of all time. What we are currently facing is the devaluation of media that can be digitized. As a “product,” why would I want to pay for CDs or DVDs when I could get an indistinguishable copy for free from others? It just doesn’t make sense; yet, ignorant artists and disillusioned executives insist that the financing of their sybarite lifestyle is somehow a “right.”

There are a number of ways to leverage the power of people-to-people (P2) networking to make money from creative efforts that myself and others have discussed previously. Yet the bottom line is this: artists today stand in the same place as everybody else: if you are trying to make money for working, you need to provide something for which others will be willing to pay. If you are simply doing something you love, by all means enjoy it – but don’t expect to get paid.

Either way, my point from the previous post stands. It will take somebody like Terminator’s director getting frustrated enough to decide that his/her creative idea is worth pursuing independently, coupled with a small but loyal fanbase to get things started. With his rabid army of supporter-worshipers, Joss Whedon could be an excellent impetus for independent television; however, a cult-spawing show like Terminator could do the same.

All that being said, I have to ask myself if it wouldn’t have been better for the show to have been cancelled after the first season. Even if the compromises the show’s  producers were forced to make have no effect in either direction on the quality of the show, enjoying a second season of the show is only a short-term benefit. I think that continuing to see promising shows killed in their infancy by studio executives is the kind of pressure that is ultimately going to improve visual entertainment.

For years, Big Content has been applying heavy stabilizing selection to their “products,” routinely choosing something that has been proven to be successful over the risky (ten seasons of Scrubs?). One could argue that this is what makes the best business sense; executives are only doing their jobs by making choices that will maximize profits for the company and its shareholders. It’s a valid position to have, but it focuses only on content as a business rather than content as creative expression. The exigency of today is that the tried-and-true business model is rapidly eroding; the age of raking in millions from a single album or television show episode is coming to a close.

What we need from television in the coming years is not more of the familiar, but actual innovation – much like music has seen from independent artists. This is often where the skeptic will point out that innovation often doesn’t capture the hearts of reviewers or pull in ratings, and once again, they are correct. Innovation is naturally risky: many ideas fail or remain niche before something emerges with the power to “go mainstream,” catching on to the point where they can be moneymaking. But this is why it’s time to see the truly creative types leave the studios and start exploring without executive pressure. While independents lose the security of a corporate “parent,” they gain both the liberty to realize their ideas and the ability to keep income local instead of paying out to middlemen.

An impressive example of this in action is Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible, distributed online and directly to DVD. Perhaps not so remarkably, the project made enough money to pay the actors and cover the bills. While I doubt anybody involved got extraordinarily wealthy, they were able to create something unique and reap the rewards of its success. Although it seems like a niche market in the short-term, the so-called “mainstream” is always far behind the trend. Ten years ago the geeks were trying to explain now-common concepts like email and instant messaging to their mainstream friends. Imagine if we had only listened to the people who said these these things weren’t worth supporting because they weren’t profitable!

I’m looking forward to watching another season of Dollhouse. However, I’m even more excited about moving toward a time when the fate of a show like Dollhouse rests not in a corporate boardroom but where it belongs: in the hands of the people who bring it to life.

There are also some glaring issues with the new shape-shifting power they’ve introduced. They had this once before in the past, only they explained it as an ability to project illusions. The character didn’t really change at all, but everybody around her saw her as changed. This time, they’ve tried to say that Sylar is “shifting his DNA,” and that the more he does it the more problems begin to occur (like finding an extra tooth). Yet that supposed issue never resurfaces, even though Syler continues to shift through multiple identities in a single scene. Also, if he’s shifting his DNA, that should change his body alone – so why is it that when he shapeshifts, he magically is wearing the other person’s clothes as well? Even Mystique (at least, pre-2001) has some limitations – she forms clothes out of her own body, and even as she changes her overall mass remains the same.

The “fight” between Nathan, Peter, and Sylar was a ridiculous cost-cutting measure. Rather than put money into special effects for a fight scene, they left it as flashes of light through a crack in the door. Seriously? Part of what makes Peter so awesome is that he can absorb Sylar’s powers, making them more or less equally matched in battle. Building up to a fight between those two characters and not showing it is a real letdown. They’d be better off not making the fight happen than hiding it like that.

There are a lot of decisions like this that have really disappointed me with Heroes over the past two seasons/three volumes, and I don’t think I’m alone. I’m not excited for season four, and after limping from episode to episode for so long, I’m ready for them to put this show down for good. If it’s anything like its characters, though, there’s no worries – it will magically reappear a few weeks later.

There’s a massive continuity error when the African prophet guy is talking to Matt Parkman – watch his staff. He’s always very clearly holding the staff horizontally over his shoulders, but in the closeup shots he’s holding it like a walking stick. Ouch.

I was also glad to get rid of the visions of the future. I understand that that’s something that’s driven the show for a while now, but it’s starting to get really old. I’m going to have a very hard time getting into a storyline where Matt draws a bunch of pictures and the rest of the cast runs around trying to figure out what they mean, or stop the big disaster. We’ll see how things shape up over the next few weeks.