This week was pretty awesome. To start off, the materials my design group needs to start construction on our project arrived (though construction has yet to begin due to less awesome issues). Following that, the final issue of Y: The Last Man arrived and gave a satisfying ending to a really great comic. And then Lost returned. That was obviously the most awesome part of this week, whether you think that’s sad or not. Finally, there was no school yesterday. OK, I should fess up about the last thing; it’s not all that awesome. I like school, and missing the chance to learn, especially when the schedule for learning is so tight, is actually pretty lame. But, sometimes it’s nice to have an unexpected respite from those stresses, even more so when it gives you a long weekend.

But all told, this week was pretty awesome. Of course, the real meat of this awesome sandwich was Y’s last issue and Lost’s premiere. As much as it sucks to see a long-term story you’ve come to look forward to go away, all stories need to end. That’s why Y was such a bittersweet experience. The final issue was more of an epilogue, recapping sixty years of the new world of inordinately few males. It highlighted the greatest hits of Yorick’s remaining life. There are some reasonably shocking moments, but all in all the story ends with a conscientious, relaxed whimper.

Lost goes in a different direction. The show blasts out of the gate and lays on the awesome in heaping dollops. From the flashforwards to the freighter people to the splitting of the losties, everything follows from the finale of last year and sets up the rest of the season. I say it sets up the rest of the season, but from what I’ve heard this season moves very fast, so many of the threads introduced over the course of this episode may be mostly resolved within the next few episodes, naturally leaving more unraveled threads to play with.

And yes, I purposefully used the word awesome way too many times in this post. I’ve always been bad at describing my opinions on recent events. I typically need some level of hindsight before I can articulate well enough to get my point across, so I’ve decided to avoid that quagmire entirely by using a simplistic adjective to demonstrate my general state. I feel that this may be yet another awesome step in my progress to developing my writing ability through accepting of existing un-awesome limitations. So… this week was pretty freaking awesome.

Final words for the televisual part of Angel’s story. And while I know people who weren’t fond of it when it first aired, I’ve loved it from the first time I saw the cut to credits. It’s not quite a Sopranos-sized ending but it still leaves you hanging, and even better it 100% fits with the major philosophy of the show. Just like the ongoing atonement and redemption, the fight against evil never ends, and you don’t do it for the prize at the end. Evil’s not there to be beat, it’s there to be fought.

There is a problem here though: the amulet. Why would Wolfram and Hart give it to Angel? There are some rationalizations made along the way but some contradict each other and none are particularly satisfying for me. It really comes down to one thing: it was a double-edged deus ex machina. The first being the thing that will save the thirty slayers from the army of twenty million ubervamps to cap off the most climactic battle in Buffy history. The second to bring Spike to Los Angeles. And dei ex machinis annoy me. But and they are not unprecedented in the Buffyverse, so I can manage.

If you ignore that little qualm, which doesn’t much interfere with your enjoyment anyways unless you’re someone who tends to quibble the minutiae, this season not only caps off one of the best shows that ever graced Television but also introduces some larger ideas that the show could have explored in future seasons. Previously, the show explored the ideas surrounding Faustian bargains and Pyrrhic victories, and those themes are expanded on this season which puts the phrase “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” to the test.

Angel and his team have been offered a powerful weapon to wield against the dark forces of the world, the only problem is it exists because of those dark forces, so to keep the weapon you have to pick your battles. Therein lies the rub, and man do the senior partners rub that shit. This season, above anything else in the series, shows that Wolfram and Hart are not really evil. They operate because of the evil in the world, and the evil inherent in the way businesses are run. Firefly had a company, Blue Sun Corporation, that arguably was the greatest force of evil in that universe, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Joss Whedon was in an anti-corporate mood when breaking these stories.

The interesting thing about this season is how various ignorant factions of evil battle each other and the casualties are all Angel’s friends. Gunn was given knowledge of the law, which led to the rebirth of Illyria inside of Fred. Meanwhile, Lindsay was employing the amulet, used in the finale of Buffy, to garner favour with the senior partners and join the Circle of the Black Thorn. And the senior partners were slowly wearing away the team’s once heroic worldview. As Lindsay said near the end of the season, heroes don’t compromise with the world; they see the world the way it is and they fight it.

All of these evils twist and distort our heroes intentions, making them less and less heroic, whether they know it or not. And when Angel is finally returned to the right path, it made sense that Cordelia would be the one to do that for him. Not because Cordelia was Angel’s most recent Love — we’ll exclude Nina since they weren’t dating yet — but because she’s the one who’s been with him since the beginning. She’s seen his ups and downs and knows what he wants to hear and what he needs to hear. It was a fitting end to the character, though if they hadn’t made her so damned mature over the past couple years it would’ve been entertaining to see her get completely swallowed up by the glitz and glam of the Wolfram and Hart lifestyle.

There are some who feel like the ending for this season was bad: they are wrong. It was the most tragic yet uplifting ending the show could have done and it’s the melange of those two characteristics that has always made Angel such a fantastic show.

Well, I gave Xander’s “growing up and out” episode a solo review, so I felt I had to do the same for Willow’s. Also, I absolutely love this episode. Of course, the weird thing here is that this isn’t a one-off, because there actually is arc development going on here, whereas The Zeppo was completely void of any of that. Of course, this episode has something up on The Zeppo: it’s written by Joss Whedon, AKA God. Which explains why it manages to beautifully interleave single episode story structure with ongoing arc elements.

But I’m gonna pretty much ignore the arc elements. It suffices to say: Faith bad, Mayor badder. On to Willow. Something about which I have had many a dream.

She finally realises that she’s boring. Well, she’s not actually boring; she’s a computer-hacking, witchcraft-performing, super-nerdy, super-sexy girl. Any one of those things on its own would mean she was not boring, and putting them all together is not a “two rights make a wrong” kind of situation. But anyway, she likes to think she’s boring and decides to be more dangerous. Which lead to her performing a funky time-folding spell with Anya, formerly the vengeance demon du jour for scorned women, that got messed up and led to her parallel world vamp version coming to in our world. And then the fun begins.

The jock whose homework was to be done by Willow get his ass womped, Willow gets to pretend to be a dominatrix psycho bitch, and last but not least we get our first overt clue to Willow’s future homosexuality. My personal views on homosexuality aren’t exactly as strict as Joss Whedon’s; for instance, just because you fall in love with a girl doesn’t mean you couldn’t also fall in love with a guy. Most people would stick to whatever side of the tracks they’re on, but if you’ve gone both ways before, you’re no longer bound to one side or the other. (To be fair, that might just be a part of my consistent delusion of hoping that Xander and Willow will end up together in the long run, because they’re perfect for each other)

There are so many school-boy-squealing, this-is-freaking-awesome moments in this episode but the best ones sums it up pretty well. Giles rushing like a little boy headed toward his mom to hug Willow. Nuff Said.

When I was young and I watched Buffy, I just enjoyed it. Now, I’ve immersed myself in television and have become better at recognizing plot holes and seeing the things you’re not supposed to. The most glaring example of this is the fight sequences so far. During every fight so far, one of the battlers has been quite visible as a stunt double. Sarah Michelle Gellar will throw a punch and then from a reverse angle, a macho woman with a completely different hairstyle, if not completely different hair colour, lands a punch. It’s all quite noticeable in my more mature eyes.

And just now, I noticed a fairly glaring plot hole. In the episode “Innocence,” the Gypsy man talks to the person entering his room as though they were Jenny Calendar with Buffy, which is what we’re led to believe given the previous scene, but it turns out to be Angel who’s there to kill the guy. Now it’s entirely plausible that Angel Knocked on the door and the Gypsy guy said “Come in” without looking assuming it was Jenny, but you’d think they could’ve shown that. Without those two additional seconds the scene feels like a gaping hole left by the writer and not only that, but the mistake wasn’t picked up by anyone else on the staff.

And yet, as with all my issues related to Buffy, it’s a drop of sucky surrounded by oceans of awesomeness, so I can’t really complain about my own growing cynicism.

Buffy’s first season had one flaw in my mind. Ignoring the bad film stock and really bad effects, the one problem I had with the storyline was what I call the “Love Line.” Willow clearly wanted to traverse the border between best friend and boyfriend with Xander and not for a moment did they not show them as being perfect candidates for such a transition. Meanwhile, Xander’s boy-child brain is stuck on dating Buffy; there’s a lot of good reasons for that, but Xander had made the decision to be in love with her before he even knew her.

I’m not saying that looks don’t matter. You tend to need that first physical push to get a guy interested in that way, but when Xander “pines” for Buffy, it seems much more about the physical than the personal and only devalues the viewer’s opinion of him. No matter how nice Buffy is to Xander, there is always that other person who knows him better than anyone else and wants him despite his flaws.

Quite frankly, it got tired fairly fast. I mean, as the show progressed it was still referenced, at least until he started dating other girls, but the first season is the most annoying because Xander thinks he still has a chance. Though it was interesting to see a show with the balls to show a “I really like you, let’s date” scene with a spectacular failure as the resolution.

All said, the first season is really strong and with its truncated form, only 12 episodes because it was a mid-season replacement, it maintains a really consistent pace of arc development, something with which later seasons sometimes struggled.

So I finally buckled under the pressure of critical praise and my long-abated desire to do so and saw Little Miss Sunshine. The longer it took me to get around to it, the more I feared I would be disappointed. All the praise that was slopped onto Napolean Dynamite before I saw it got me overexcited and I didn’t want Little Miss Sunshine to suffer the same fate. Fortunately, there was a difference between the two movies: Little Miss Sunshine didn’t suck.

Unlike its indie darling predecessor, the film’s characters don’t feel like they’re quirky for the sake of being quirky. Each eccentricity feels real. Each action follows from the character not the script. Not only that, throughout the whole desperate hilarious affair you actually see characters change. And when the sea change comes upon them, it’s not a instant but the culmination of past events. One such moment of change is the dance scene. Oh the dance scene.

If you’re going to have your movie and its characters pivot on an awkwardly bad dance sequence, do it the way Little Miss Sunshine did it; when that scene started, I had flashbacks to Napoleon Dynamite and feared the worst. And once again Little Miss Sunshine did what a good movie should do: it surprised, it warmed the heart, it made you feel like all the pain in the world is worth it for these few moments we have together.

On a tangent, the movie’s soundtrack is really good and the song which finishes off the movie is a variant of DeVotchKa’s “How It Ends.” I’ve been a fan of DeVotchKa ever since I downloaded “Una Volta” a couple years ago. Their music truly defies categorization and is filled with the same melancholic yet bucolic sense as this movie. In fact, this movie reintroduced me to DeVotchKa as I hadn’t listened to anything new of theirs in quite some time so that alone was enough to make me enjoy this movie. But that’s not the only thing this movie did. I feel reinvigorated regarding independent film. It’s been a long time since I’ve headed down to cumberland to see the newest limited release film and this movie reminded me of why I should.

I could write something here about how great the songs were or how Hinton Battle, who choeregraphed and starred in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode, choerographed it, or how the blood splattering over the audience was awesome, or how the show both honoured and poked fun at the original Evil Dead series, or how the tickets were only twenty bucks but that would only waste precious time you should be spending getting tickets. Go now.

IPv6 is the next step in the Internet. At least that’s what was promised over a decade ago when IPv6 was first announced. The problem was the the four billion or so addresses allowed in IPv4 (that’s what you’re using right now) weren’t enough to accommodate everybody. The world was going to run out of IP addresses. And soon. That’s why most home networks use routers; routers allow multiple computers to use a single IP address with the added benefit of making the computers behind the router inaccessible from the public internet. But even with routers and NAT and all the kludges designed to extend IPv4, that’s all they do: extend. We’re slowly and surely running out of IP addresses and that’s why IPv6 was designed.

Now there are lots of valid reasons why IPv6 should be adopted and many other reasons why it hasn’t yet been adopted. There are more knowledgeable people to explain all the intricate awesomeness in IPv6. What I really care about is a quote I read in an ars technica article on the subject regarding the sheer size of the IPv6 address space:

The total number of possible addresses that this gives us [is] 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. To put this into perspective: there are currently 130 million people born each year. If this number of births remains the same until the sun goes dark in 5 billion years, and all of these people live to be 72 years old, they can all have 53 times the address space of the IPv4 Internet [4,294,967,296 addresses] for every second of their lives.

If that doesn’t get you excited about IPv6… well you’re not a geek like me.

Well over the years I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube. At first I was satisfied with solving only one face; anything more seemed excessively complex and I didn’t want to dedicate the mental effort of planning the whole procedure out. Over time the sheer challenge forced me to continue my efforts. I didn’t get very far after that simply because I neither was willing to put the effort in or willing to find out if the effort would be worth it (that is, if I could actually manage to solve it on my own). So I began browsing Rubik’s Cube solving sites, which are a fantastic resource if you’re looking into the problem. I initially expected to find a rote technique which I could follow mindlessly to make myself feel smart. Now I know that, while there is a great deal of memorization involved, strategy still weighs heavily on the mind. Obviously, the longer you work on Cubing the better you will get and the more mechanical the movements will become, but the root of that knowledge lies inside actual deductive capabilities. Long story short, I just finished solving my first Rubik’s Cube. It took a little while and the final steps contained complicated movement sequences which I had to follow very very slowly but it is done. Now to get obscenely good at it and impress no-one seeing as there are dozens of websites which provide all the information you need to solve Cubes.