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- Adam Sternbergh of New York Magazine has an interesting piece about why Lost doesn’t work as a TV show, and what can be done to fix it. He makes a good point and echoes many of the same sentiments I felt last season (although I’ve actually been enjoying Season 3 so far). I think it’s only a matter of time before viewers start to rebel against these obtuse serialized mystery shows. (via Boing Boing)

- Another Survivor contestant revealed to be a porn star? What kind of screening process do they use to recruit people anyway? Well, considering the last guy actually won the million, maybe this Ozzy guy has a shot too.

- Why you shouldn’t bother trying to mug David Copperfield.

- Microsoft’s X-Box 360 HD-DVD Player add-on just came out a few days ago and apparently it’s already been compromised by hackers who found a way to use it on a PC without the need for an X-Box at all. I wonder how long that will last.

- Guns N Roses recently cancelled a show in Portland after being told that they could not consume alcohol on stage. A band spokesperson later blamed fire marshals for “making it impossible for the band to perform their show to the usual high standards that their fans deserve”. Because, you know, it’s the Jagrmeister that gives Axl his edge.

- Most importantly, there’s been a major breakthrough in air guitar technology! Australian scientists have invented something called the Wearable Instrument Shirt (WIS). Sensors are built into the fabric so that hand movements can be mapped to musical notes. AWESOME. In other words, BodyRap meets Guitar Hero! (via The Feed)

I’m not too sure what I expected from this show, but it was a little bit underwhelming in terms of scale. There were still some pretty amazing gadgets though (and some pretty silly ones too).

One of the first things we saw upon entering was a giant screen that projected pictures onto fog. I’m totally getting one of these for our house. Walking through the ethereal images, we observed GE’s Kitchen of the Future. Apparently the Kitchen of the Future will guide you through recipes and help set the oven temperature for you. Come on man, I was hoping to see a Star Trek food replicator by now, and all I got was a fridge that tells me when I’m out of pickles?

Over in the Space Exploration area they had some cool astronaut suits, a model of Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic’s Spaceshipone, and a droid that can be moved remotely with a virtual reality suit (among other things). It was actually pretty surreal seeing a demo of this in action, as they had a TV screen showing the robot’s POV through its cameras. It like, totally blew my mind man. In the meantime, someone across the way was trying to tell people about the wonders of Multispectral Imaging. BORING!

On to Robot Row, where highlights included some ballroom dancing robots (those crazy Japanese inventors!), a couple robotic arms spinning some tunes on wax, and Alex HUBO, the now famous walking robot with the expressive face of Albert Einstein. This was second in eerie realism only to the Kokoro “Actroid”, designed to be a receptionist and/or nanny. Creepy stuff.

Then we got our body heat scanned courtesy of Xerox, and relaxed in the lounge area with a nice cool can of Coca-Cola Blāk (coffee-flavoured Coke… GOOD STUFF). The lounge area also had some cool games projected on screens and floors which you could interact with physically courtesy of Playmotion. Looks like the Nintendo Wii might have some competition!

We quickly skipped over the military stuff (BomBots, ’nuff said), and The Future of Green exhibits (pretty hard to make windmills exciting) and went straight to the Entertainment and Gaming sections.

It was here that we saw some of the coolest stuff, and some of the weirdest. Kick Ass Kung-Fu is a side scrolling fighting game that motion captures your movement and inserts a digitized version of you into the game, along with any weapons you happen to be holding. Kids were going crazy over this thing, swinging their backpacks, sweaters and just about anything else they could get their hands on. We also had a chat with Quasi, The Interactive Robot. This thing was pretty crazy… it seemed like he could remember people he had talked to earlier in the day by their image and sound, and conversations with him were incredibly realistic and expressive. I was dumbfounded, until found out later that there was actually a “man behind the curtain”! What a scam!

At this point we thought we’d try our hand at Conspiratio, the “virtual drinking game”. I still don’t quite understand what the heck this thing was. There was some sort of mechanical cup with a straw that could be placed on top of coasters with pictures of different types of food. When you sucked, you didn’t get any taste, but rather just blasts of air that sort of simulated the feeling of sucking up certain things in a straw. Whenever someone would look up quizically at the Japanese dude running the booth he would just smile and offer, “Give you drinking sensation!” I guess there was a game element to this as well, although it obviously went over my head.

Last but not least, Simon and I had to try out the door of the future… the E-Taf Automatic Door. It has metal strips that slide open horizontally to surround the shape of your body. I guess the idea is to keep the door as airtight as possible while you pass through it, but let’s be honest… it’s just looks freakin’ cool. The only problem was I kind of broke the door, it took me 3 or 4 tries to actually get it to open all the way. Maybe I need to lose some weight? There’s a scary thought.

All in all, Wired Nextfest was a strange but enjoyable experience, and worth the price of admission (especially considering it also counted as a renewal of my yearly Wired subscription). But I will say this: the next time I head to New York I’ll probably spend a little less time seeking out dancing robots and Japanese straw games. I still can’t believe we missed Brainball though… the game you win by relaxing!

(More photos can be found at my Flickr account.)

Earlier this year I was totally hooked after my first exposure to the show, blowing through episodes on DVD like there was no tomorrow. I was buying into all the hype and selling it too — I wrote a pretty glowing review of Season 2.0 on DVD. I even forgave them for splitting season 2 up into two separate DVD releases just to make more money. The storyline up until that point was pretty solid and moved at a breakneck pace. I couldn’t wait to see what was coming next. That’s when all the trouble started.

Season 2 had a few one shot episodes that I really didn’t like. They strayed from the main storyline and aside from throwing off the continuity, they were really poorly written. But I realize now that those episodes in particular weren’t the major problem. The real problem is that somewhere along the way, they just lost all the momentum they had built up in season 2.

Everything was leading up to this mystical search for the legendary planet Earth, and then just when they stumbled across the “tomb of Athena”… poof. Nothing. It’s like the writers realized they had no plan, nowhere else to go, so they just kind of rebooted the story and started all over again. I was a little unsure how I felt about the cliffhanger ending of season 2, but I thought I’d give them a chance to follow up on it in Season 3. Now in Season 3 I’m finding it hard to sit through new episodes.

All of the characters have become contrived and pathetic. I realize they’re inventing all these flaws and weaknesses so that when they overcome them later it will be some major triumph. But it just seems so cliched. Lee gets fat. Starbuck suddenly becomes passive and obedient because she has a baby. Odama now trusts Sharon more than anyone else. How does all of this come to pass? And need I mention, I fucking hate Colonel Tigh and his wife, that whole relationship is just ridiculous. The fact that we are now supposed to identify with some of the cylons is even more frustrating.

Yeah I know, it’s groundbreaking television because they are creating parallels to the war on Iraq. Big deal. Like that hasn’t been done before. I don’t mind political undertones but now it just feels forced and way too obvious.

So although I’ve come to appreciate some of the finer points of episodic television in recent years, here’s the dilemma… it’s pretty damn hard to maintain strong writing, believable characters and high tension for an extended run. All I know is you’d better have a good plan from the start, otherwise you’re going to fizzle out somewhere in season 2, just like BSG did. For all my complaining about the less interesting second season of Lost, at least there’s still an overarching plan and strong acting to carry it through.

I’d like to see how mainstream audiences react to Battlestar Galactica if NBC really does decide to move it off cable to a network primetime slot. My guess is, they’ll realize it’s a frakkin’ joke a lot quicker than I did.

I can only assume that it is a joke, considering that it would probably also require an oxygen tank to use safely. Still, I’d probably wear one around the house, if only because I consider myself an “early adopter”.

Source: Joystiq

Anyway, I just read today that scientists in Denmark have managed to teleport both light and actual matter across a distance of half a meter. In the experiment they sent a “macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms” within a split second. It’s still a far cry from being able to transport an actual human being, but I suppose it’s the first indication that teleportation may actually be possible. Of more immediate interest is the fact that this also opens up possibilities for quantum computing — a concept I don’t fully grasp, but one that will apparently blow the roof off of current computational limits. Well, as long as someone out there knows what they’re doing, I have a feeling the future’s going to be pretty damn interesting.

Source: CNN