Keeping myself honest

I’ve been a big Battlestar Galactica fan since I was introduced to the show in the middle of the second season. At first I shied away from watching episodes as the dark, somewhat depressing storyline made my stomach heavy always waiting for the next shoe to drop (which it always did in the worst way possible).

I grew to love the story, the characters and to some degree the dark atmosphere (what can I say I’m somewhat of a pessimist and also enjoy dark humour). As I got further into it and started listening to the episode commentary I realized that some of my other favorite Scifi (Star Trek: TNG and DS9) was also written by executive produce Ronald D. Moore and I got on board for the usually intense ride that showed up each week. Even when the series took unexpected turns (such as moving the story ahead by a year in the blink of a eye)  the resolutions of the twists were always good and made the overall story stronger.

When I started this post it was purely to say how absurd the casting of John Hodgman in last weeks episode was, which in itself is a possible jumping the shark moment, but after watching this week’s episode I have a bad feeling that that might have only been the beginning. Despite all the exposition (and there was a lot) and the questionable casting (which made it so I couldn’t take a brain surgery scene seriously)  the episode from last week was very solid and did a good job of explaining one of the major mysteries of the in a coherent and interesting way.

Fast forward to this week…

This week everything seems to have fallen completely flat. The sections that are supposed to be the big emotional releases (Adama falling apart because of what he has to do to save the ship and the baby dying) leave something to be desired and don’t grab the you the way they should. This is usually the difference between a good acting and bad acting as sometimes these things just click. The part that really got me was the inconsistency in the story. How does the chief have a sudden 180 degree turn of opinion on whether to stay or not right after getting his rank back and convincing Adama to use the cylon material to save the ship? The only answer is they needed a tie in the votes so they just decided to change his character’s stance on a whim.

The worst offender of this is when they decide to give the religious cult guns for no reason other than Baltar (a man we know to be honest and trustworthy…)  says there is civil unrest. No kidding! We just finished a mutiny arc where Adama was almost executed by his own men, and he’s willing to just give guns away to one group of civilians to keep another in check?! Other than a ham handed metaphor for US foreign policy there is no logical reason for this to happen and just seems like the writing are creating a possible huge problem from nothing just to have more conflict in the show.

I will watch the final four episodes and hope that they deliver on the great storytelling and mystery that I’ve come to love but I doubt I will watch the spin off series as without the action there is definitely something missing in the formula that makes Battlestar great.  So here’s to lots of explosions in the finale.

Scotty B Commentary

So as I sit here completely swarmed by work and other mundane duties it finally has dawned on my what the little something I’ve been missing to make my day to day life fun. You may be shocked at what I found but the missing piece was stress.  Now for most people in the world stress is something you avoid at all costs because well its stress and its usually indicative of something not going well.

Apparently not for me, I have fun with stress and thrive on it to some degree. There’s something about a stressful situations that seems to bring out the best in me. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is and I can only come up with the fact that if something is stressful than its both important and challenging.

Easy things aren’t stressful because they don’t take a lot of effort to do so there is little chance of them being done improperly or with a sub standard level of quality. Thing that aren’t important aren’t stressful because there is little consequence for them not being completed or being partially completed as the more important events take more priority.

So it probably seems weird to most people to like stress but I do so apparently all I need to do now is find a job that is stressful and I’ll be set for the rest of my life. That should be easy to do, right?

Scotty B Personal, Work

So as we speak, or more accurately I type I’m still in the middle of some updates to both my blog and the site. I’ve added a feedburner plugin to make handling rss related tasks easier and to work around the retarded security features that silverlight has installed (Seriously I can’t make a web request for an xml  file without your permission what kind of idiot thought that up).

I’ve also changed the theme of the blog to be a little more clean and less resource intensive and will probably be tweaking it for a while to come. The main site should soon have a silverlight blog reader even if there are still some bugs to work out (I know the text looks like crap but it’s not my fault). Internet Explorer is also being very annoying and not processing style sheets the way it is supposed to so I have to do some rigging there as well.

In other software news, I find it hilarious that someone actually got a research budget to produce songsmith at Microsoft. If you haven’t looked this up there are a ton of youtube videos showing it butchering different songs. On the opposite end of the scale I am so far very impressed with the Live Mesh and WIndows 7 Betas so I suppose all this proves that in a company a big as Microsoft you get a full range of projects and talents.

I don’t think I can put into words how good the latest episodes of Battlestar Galactica are and I am stunned at how hard they are running towards the end of the series and they have definitely grabbed my attention again and I’m waiting on the edge of my seat to see what they’re going to do next week.

Finally on the gaming front I’m almost done Gears of War 2 so I’ll probably have some wrap up thoughts when I do.

Scotty B Personal