Daughter: Dad, I meant to ask you, how do you get along with the new iPad that we gave? you as a birthday present?
Dad: Good.
Daughter: You also get along with all those apps?
Dad: What apps? Can you please move a little bit …. so ….. What?
[Via]
Other Shows Netflix Should Consider UnCancelling
TV Shows get cancelled. It happens. There are a lot of reasons they decide to swing that axe, but at the end of the day, nothing lasts forever. Even with the Simpson’s seemingly unending parade of seasons, that too will one day end.
So with last week’s news that Terra Nova has been cancelled, a followup story suggested that Netflix is looking to pick up the show as exclusive content for their on-demand service. I think this is a great idea.
GiantFreakingRobot has an article up suggesting 10 other shows that have been cancelled that they feel deserve to be resurrected before Terra Nova.
Of course the cult classic Firefly tops their list, and they mention some other good shows as well. Original/Exclusive content is really what the On-Demand streaming format needs to stand out. Right now, as impressive as it is, Netflix doesn’t offer much that falls in the category of “new,” so why not reach out to those niche shows that could be made on-the-cheap.
This is my list of shows that In MY opinion deserve a second life.
Jericho
A surprise nuclear strike simultaneously wipes out most of North America’s cities. The small farming town of Jericho is just far enough away from it all to not be affected. The show balances survival in a new world with the mystery and intrigue of who was responsible for the strike and why. It was Netflix that caught me onto this show in the first place, and I was hooked. The show had seriously good writing and a great concept with characters you couldn’t help but love.
Pushing Daisies
This quirky Bryan Fuller scripted show features Ned as a man with a unique gift. Ned can raise someone from the dead with a touch and send them back to the beyond with another. If they live beyond one minute, someone else dies in their place. He teams up with a private investigator who takes advantage of his gift to solve murders (by asking the victim). This is another one where the characters and snappy dialogue really sell the show. Lots of charm and light hearted fun set against a strangely dark concept.
Wonderfalls
This show is also by Bryan Fuller, which features Caroline Dhavernas as Jaye, a minimum wage tourist trap clerk in Niagara Falls whose misguided life of ruin starts to turn around when inanimate objects around her begin to give her cryptic advice. She knows she isn’t crazy, but if she goes against the advice of these animal shaped objects that only she can see, things turn out bad.
The show only saw 13 episodes, but it totally absorbed me with its cleverness and cast of loveable characters.
Better off Ted
Sitcoms are like candy. If they don’t have the one you like at the store, you just grab something else and you are fine with it. But this short lived tv series had just SO MUCH potential and personality that it was a shame when it was shut down. Staring Jay Harrington and Portia de Rossi, this office comedy was just so off the wall, you couldn’t help but cheer on this corrupt mega-corporation and the lunacy people working there endured in their daily lives. The Research and Development department alone could have been its own show. Sadly, after two seasons it too was canned.
Deadwood
No show in the history of television will ever amount to the sheer amount of Cussing in this HBO Western. Many wrote off the drama of a frontier town in its earliest days for its excessive violence, sex, and blush-worthy use of the f-word. But under all of that was an incredibly well balanced and well presented character drama of politics, romance, and social interaction. Timothy Olyphant is awesome as a former US Marshall who would rather just sell supplies in a retail shop. Of course, Ian McShane often stole the show with his monologues and ambiguous morals.
Honorable mentions: Legend of the Seeker, Chuck, Mr Sunshine, and 18 to Life.
So what would YOU like to see brought back? And would bringing that show exclusively to a service like Netflix make you want to sign up?
Awesome Geek Pop Reinterpretation [Images]
Step aside Dali; make way for Hillary White and these amazing revisions of popular culture in twisted and pretty awesome forms.
Vader seems to have bit of an affectionate side in Hillary White’s world. Unless he was doing something a little more untoward to that unicorn than initially meets the eye…
Check out her site here, or if you’re interested in purchasing her prints, go here.
[Via Swellco & Swellco]
Thoughts? New Video Ad Unit on [GAS]
Edit: Removed the ad unit for now. I have to reflect on this… :)
Hey everyone!
I’ve recently implemented a new video ad unit on [GAS], and I wanted to know if something like this would cause you to stop reading the site. The ad just plays once per 24 hours per U.S. user. This is obviously an important issue for me since I’m asking you guys about it, but know that the large majority of my income comes from the site, so something like this make a huge difference for me at the end of a month.
So let me know people, do you think you could live with something like this just once per 24 hours? Please let me know!
Toy Story Characters on Facebook [Picture]
[Via]
Alien-Inspired High-Heels [Picture]
Created by the late Alexander McQueen in 2010, these Alien-inspired high-heels never actually made it to the market, probably because they’re not what most people would call “comfortable,” even though they’d be major head turners.
[Via SFX]
Why I Pay For a Data Plan on my Smartphone [Graph]
Auto-translation gets more personal
Microsoft believes it has taken automatic speech translation to the next step: using something close to your own voice rather than what sounds like a robot.
There have been several developments in speech recognition and translation in recent years, most notably Google’s translation app on Android that can allow two people who speak different languages to converse. Well, as long as they don’t mind passing a smartphone back and forth and pressing a button to show the speaker has changed — and as long as the phone’s owner can convey that requirement to the other speaker.
Indeed, it’s looking very conceivable that concept will lead to the point where two speakers of different languages can talk on the telephone, with the translation quick enough to make real-time conversation viable.
One drawback, however, is that computer-generated speech often sounds disappointingly artificial (though using Kindle text-to-speech on A Brief History Of Time is a particularly weird experience.) It is unnaturally rhythmic and doesn’t reflect the distinctive pitch or accent of the speaker.
The Microsoft system attempts to solve that by piecing together the speech from the user’s own voice. It requires about an hour of training, with the user reading out a series of sounds in their own language, along with variations and combinations in other languages. These recordings are then stitched together to make the “foreign” speech.
Technology Review has posted examples of the system in action. To my ears, the results still sound very artificial, though it is a little closer to the speaker’s own voice (Microsoft’s Rick Rachid) than a “standard” robotic voice. It might have been better if the demonstration had involved subjects with more distinctive voices or accents.
For the system to develop further, it might need a longer training period in order to record the person saying the same sound with different intonations or levels of emphasis, meaning the translated speech could capture more of the mood and emotion of the speaker.
(Image: Tower of Babel by Lucas van Valckenborch)