Well, not really. I’m probably gonna keep writing here until someone pays me to stop, because I like writing and ranting. But this blog is dead from a monetary perspective. These words will never make me money, because my blog is not a niche blog. I don’t focus on one thing alone. Sure most of my posts involve television in one way or another, but I don’t limit my words.

And niche blogs are the only kind that can last in this new web, where there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, with a large majority of them being useless chatter about whatever’s on the author’s mind. That is, just like mine. So I’m a drop in an ocean. The sheer density of the blogosphere makes it nigh impossible for a blog that doesn’t have very frequent very insightful very narrowly focused content to be seen amid the detritus.

But, as the little subheading of my blog says, everything matters. I could very easily devote this blog to television, or to science fiction, or to science fiction television, or to mid-90′s science fiction television, or to any number of painfully constructed microverses, but I’d rather do my own thing.

One factor that comes into play is my generally lackluster writing capabilities. I don’t consider myself a bad writer, and on certain days I might even be a good writer, but it takes more than that to be noticed. For every well-written insightful niche blog there are dozens more that write about the same things but with less clarity and fewer readers. So, in my particular case, the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t problems inherent in my unexceptional prose also decrease my incentive to overspecialize.

But there’s more than just that pragmatic urge at work when I make the active decision to write broadly¹. Good storytelling does more than focus. While my material on this blog is primarily “non-fiction” I generally draw my writing inspirations from the world of fiction. The best television shows out there are the best because, aside from creating a compelling foreground, the effort exerted on the background reifies that world.

And while I’m not creating a world, I am defining a world: the world as I see it. If this blog were focused on one thing in particular, you would know that that one thing is important to me, but that’s all you’d know. And I don’t think that’s enough. I think that to find my stance on anything to be of value, you need more than just that stance. You need to see the words written here as coming from a person, to judge them beyond their surface structure. It needs to come from a living person. So this blog is dead, but I am very much alive².

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Footnotes

1. The next example is going to be about television, so I hope you’ll enjoy the irony. [↩]
2. If you’re reading this after I’ve died, clearly that last point is no longer valid. [↩]

What is /.? Beyond an excuse to sexually abuse your grammar checker, /. (slashdot) is a tech news site. With the recent boom of Web 2.0 many people have seen the future heading away from sites like slashdot where editors determine the content of the site and towards social websites with user generated content.

Of course, the arguments for and against Web 2.0 are numerous and varied. Pretending like I have the definitive answer is absurd, but I do find that historically the solution to most problems is found between the two extremes. Which is why slashdot’s “Fire Hose”  — which allows user generated content to be voted on by anyone but still requires editor’s to officially upgrade it to the front page — is the closest I’ve seen to the best of both worlds.

Of course, people have said for a few years now “go to Digg for the stories, go to slashdot for the comments” which is true for two reasons. Firstly, comments on Digg are frequently stupid, ignorant, racist, prejudiced, or all of these and many more. Their comments are so offensive at times that I no longer go to the site at all because I was simply disgusted by the comments I was seeing on a daily basis. Slashdot, on the other hand, tends to have more comments per story but because of their moderation technique you tend to get really smart or really funny stuff bubbling to the top. Granted, the know-it-alls on slashdot know that they know it all, but if you’re willing to suffer through a bit of conceit you’re almost guaranteed to learn something new or at the very least be given another perspective on something you already know.

Slashdot has an antiquated perception among the younger internet dwellers but I think that slashdot will survive at least as long as Digg and most likely outlive it because of its ability to grow into a new internet experience (social networking, et. al.) while retaining its original goals and experiences. But the real reason slashdot is still relevant is a simple one: quotes like this in random user’s signatures:

“Sisko > Picard > Kirk > Archer > null > Janeway”

Granted, I would have swapped Picard and Sisko but to see another person judge Janeway accurately warms the ventricles of my heart.

This post has gone through a number of revisions. First I discussed why the actors in the upcoming film Watchmen need to really understand and embrace the atypical nature of Watchmen the comic to ensure the film doesn’t fall into the trap of becoming a “comic book movie” but with the recent announcement of (most of) the cast I’m relatively at ease regarding that. Then this post was to be a rant on Zack Snyder, the director of the film, his lack of experience, and his dogmatic relience on the original comic for visual details. Then Comic-Con came around and Zack Snyder represented himself as someone who knew what the fuck he was talking about and that eased. (He still seems to have some issues with deviating from vision of the text for the purpose of retaining the message of the text, but at least he’s shown that he’s a real fan of the comic and understands why it’s great.) So I figured I’d discuss the reason I began to write this post in the first place.

Watchmen is a great comic. It’s a zeitgeist for a time which our world managed to avoid, filled with mounting conflicts on a global scale and the constant fear of mutually assured destruction. Watchmen is set in a world where superheroes really fight crime through vigilante justice; most of them are good-hearted people who want to make a difference in their city. The key difference from the classic superheroes is that they have no mythic origins, they have no extraordinary powers. They saw this terrifying world and decided to make any difference they could. These are people who took on a battle larger than themselves not because they thought they could win but because it had to be done.

All except for one. Doctor Manhattan is a God among men. His powers seem limitless and we are to him little more than particles of dust flitting about in Brownian motion. He has all the trappings of superheroism but because he is inherently inhuman he becomes a complex compelling character whose decisions sometimes impress and often horrify. But the story of Watchmen isn’t about Doctor Manhattan. It is the story of the people who didn’t wake up one day with superpowers and then decide they should fight crime. They didn’t need a convoluted catastrophic event like an uncle being killed by the robber they could’ve stopped earlier to make them take the leap into the selfless, unforgiving, and sometimes overpowering, world of crimefighting. These people walked down a street one day, saw a mugging that everyone else ignored, and stepped in.

Watchmen is quite probably the greatest comic ever made. Because the characters feel real, and because the questions of morality and power are substantive and have a real, though ambiguous, contribution to make. And for reasons which are intrinsic to the paper; it must be read to be understood. So when I heard about a Watchmen movie I first felt elation. The idea of it happening was fantastic. Of course then I realised it’s the implementation that would destroy it. The odds of the film doing justice to its source material are so mindbogglingly high that anyone genuinely and purely excited without a hint of doubt or hesitation isn’t a true fan of Watchmen.

You know sometimes I need to be reminded how absolutely, breathtakingingly, heartbreakingly beautiful the world can be. I spend so much time sitting at a desk, both at work and at home, that when I finally get out of my seat I tend to treat the world as a means to an end. I go out into it to get the basics and return to my cave. That’s why every once in a while, when on my journey to the outerworld interstices, I stumble upon… the world. I looked up just a half hour ago and saw a perfectly clear night sky. It made me want to go drive out into the deep woods where no artificial light pollutes the sky and just stare at the stars. Even here, in this oversaturated suburban night I stood there agape for a few moments, unable to look away, my vision transfixed on the unending void. Of course, after a short while reliving my former years as a quixotic romantic I politely shelve it away, remember that I must let that part of me out more often and return to my life as it was. Then I blog about it. Sigh…

I upgraded my computer last summer. I got two 24″ widescreen monitors and delighted with glee. While dual monitors has its usefulness the primary reason I went with two 24 inch models, rather than the single 30 inch for which I had originally budgeted, was because I thought it would be great to be able to have a movie or TV show on the secondary monitor while I browsed the internet or did work on the primary screen. Be careful what you wish for.

I’m always discovering new TV shows and my personal faves are serialized stories with complex interwoven plot and character relations. That stuff just gets me going. Unfortunately, that type of show requires a lot of attention to details to be truly enjoyed. And because this dual monitor set up is so tempting I often find myself catching up on blogs and strolling through wikipedia while I should be paying more attention to the details of the story. In fact, I got the idea for this post while watching an episode of Veronica Mars.

Paying less attention when I’m watching shows like Smallville or Numb3rs isn’t a big deal, but I’ve been doing it with almost all my shows recently. The only show that’s remained at full attention is Lost and that’s because I watch it on my family’s big screen rather than on my computer. Even with Lost, I find myself drifting along with the later viewing when on my computer. There’s an easy solution in simply turning off one of the monitors when I need to pay more attention to what I’m doing. I’ve done it on occasion when the second screen is too tempting while studying but to simply cast it aside makes it seem like such a waste. And in the end, television is much more entertaining for me and provides a much needed distraction from the banality of my life. I suppose I’ll just turn off the other monitor.

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.