For shame!

One of my pet peeves is when people don't return their shopping carts to a store's designated cart return area. It's so lazy and inconsiderate. Is it really THAT much effort to walk a few extra steps to put the cart away? Do people really not care that the cart, at best, is clogging up the parking lot by taking up a space, and at worst, could damage someone's car? Not to mention that having the stores' employees wander around the parking lots gathering carts is time that the employees could be spending doing other, more constructive things, like stocking merchandise, helping customers, etc. In other words, this costs the stores money, which in turn gets passed on to the consumers.

The other day, Mr. Entity and I were in a parking lot that had been frequented by several extremely lazy people. I decided it was time for a public shaming, of sorts, so I whipped out my camera phone. Not that any of these people will read this, of course, but going to the effort of annotating the pictures and posting them online has given me a thrill of righteous indignation.


I mean, really! In two pictures, the cart is literally TWO parking spaces away! In another, there are at least two cart returns nearby! Truly, these acts of laziness are a sight to see.

Stargate Universe: Are you kidding me?

This is old news, but I found a page online that supposedly lists the character descriptions for Universe. I don't know if this is authentic, but if it is, it is horrific.

http://stargate-sg1-solutions.com/blog/?p=1619

Character Breakdowns, Stargate Universe 03/09/08

Colonel Everett Young. 40’s handsome, capable, former SG team leader. Like the Jack O’Neill of ten years ago, but Young’s edges have tended to sharpen over time. He requested permission to serve the remainder of his commission on Earth upon marrying his wife, Hailey, two years ago, but for now he’s temporary commander of a secret off world base. The loss of two members of his team several years ago has taught him never to take anything for granted, and be prepared for anything. He stays on top of his team so they stay alive.

Tamara Johanson. 20-25. SGC Field medic, Captain grade. Off world experience. Beautiful, tough, smart, capable. Paramedic level training. Able to triage serious injury. Modest background. Dreamed of being a doctor but couldn’t afford medical school and the Air Force was her best option. She ends up being the most medically inclined person on the ship but is overwhelmed by the lack of knowledge and experience treating seriously wounded and ill patients. She also lacks the medicine and supplies and has to make do.

Cloe Carpenter. 20 ish. Stunning and sexy. Daughter of a U.S. Senator. Silver spoon upbringing and a little spoiled but not stupid either. Politically and socially savvy. Dreams of following in her father’s footsteps but for now she’s a bit of a party girl in her first year at an Ivy League school. Her father’s tragic death and the dire circumstances of being trapped on a spaceship seriously tests her character.

Eli Hitchcock. 20-25. Total slacker. Utter genius. Mathematics, computers, anything he puts his mind to. Acerbic sense of humor. A social outcast. Comes from a broken home. Lacks confidence because his true intelligence has never really been recognized like Matt Damon’s character from Good Will Hunting with a little Jack Black thrown in.

Lt. Jared Nash. 20-25. Junior SGC team member. Officer material but green and rough around the edges. Every teenage girl’s fantasy. Like a college quarterback thrown into his first pro game, he is thrust into the role of leader well before he’s ready for the responsibility and must learn to take command, earn respect through action, and manage the diverse personalities on the ship to keep everyone alive. Like Jason Bourne, he is skilled and well-trained but mentally unprepared for the urgency of the situation.

Ron “Psycho” Stasiak. 20. Marine. Big, strong, silent. You want him on your side. You don’t want him mad at you. Lacks control over his temper in non combat situations. His emotional expression ranges from sarcasm to anger. His past is a mystery but it’s clear something dark formed the hard shell around him. Yet, there must also be some moral center because otherwise he’d kill everyone around him. Think Eric Bana’s character “Hoot” in Blackhawk Down. Adam Baldwin at 20 could play him.

Geez, where to begin. The first character, the one in his 40s, will basically be a parent chaperoning a bunch of kids? *eyeroll* I could understand 1 or 2 of them being young (e.g. taking some recruits on a training mission with some mentors, something going wrong, etc.), but ALL of them? The characters also sound like stereotypes: the sorority girl, the male slacker genius, etc. Would it be too much to ask that they shake things up a little? Like if they HAVE to have a slacker genius, that it be female, for once? Or have the guy be the spoiled brat? I am also offended that 100% of the women have "beautiful" and "sexy" as their character requirements, but only 1 out of 4 of the guys do. (However, one of the guys is described as "Every teenage girl’s fantasy", so I suppose that physical attractiveness is implied.)

This is not to say that I am opposed to trying to attract younger fans to Stargate. It's probably good long-term business for Stargate to hook fans when they're young, so they can grow up (sort of) with the show. Also, I am not opposed to having some younger characters on the show, for variety. But given the level of technical and military expertise that is needed to work on a Stargate mission, and given the level of clearance that someone would need to work on a program like Stargate, young people who are qualified to work on the team should be somewhat rare. Will the mission that strands these characters consist of ALL of the young people in the ENTIRE Stargate program? Also, as Mr. Entity said, this character sounds like Wormhole X-Treme. In 200, they even joked about replacing the main characters with younger versions, and it was portrayed as a really bad idea.

Given the quality of episodes in Season 5 of Atlantis, and given this as a starting point for Universe, I am not excited about the new show at all.

Bloglets

Check out this Daily Show Video.

This is a great example of why I hate partisan politics and so-called "news" shows. So, when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, her parents are pinheads, but when a Republican politican's underage daughter gets pregnant, it is a family matter? And Tim Kaine would've been less qualified to be a vice presidential candidate, given that he has been governor for more time than Palin and was mayor of a town that is larger than the town Palin was mayor of? Riiiiight.

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On the drive home... both Rock 105.3 and 91X were playing the world premier of the new Metallica song on the "Metallica radio network" (ugh). I retreated to the Jack FM station, which played Googoo Dolls' "Name" (mmm... 90s angst) followed by Poison's "Unskinny Bop" (mmm... aqua net).

Stargate Atlantis: Cancellation and Season 5 so far

I heard last Friday that SciFi has canceled Stargate Atlantis.

I am definitely not going to say that I am glad the show was canceled, but I am not surprised. Season 4 had some good episodes (Adrift, Lifeline, Be All My Sins Remember'd), some real stinkers (Quarantine and Harmony; IMO, Harmony is runner-up to "worst Atlantis episode ever", behind season 3's Irresistible), but overall was bland. Colonel Carter was both underused and misused: she was hardly there, and when she was, rather than being the brilliant scientist we loved from SG1, she was a bureaucrat. Seeing the writers treat the charater this way was very disappointing. The overall quality of the season left me with a feeling of uncertainty at each new episode (would it be good??), rather one of feeling of excitement.

Season 5 didn't get off to a great start. First, the aforementioned Col. Carter is unceremoniously dismissed. Sure, Amanda Tapping's web series Sanctuary got picked up by SciFi, making her unavailable for Atlantis, but that didn't mean the writers had to make the character leave in such a disrespectful manner. Carter's exit from the "Stargateverse" deserved fanfare, trumpets, a ticket-tape parade, a 21-Jaffa-staff-weapon salute...the works.

And then there was also the Weir/Higginson situation.

In short, the past two seasons, the writers have been on cruise control with rehashed and scifi-cliche storylines (e.g. The Seed, discussed below), and they have not treated many of the characters with respect. Cancellation is not a surprise.

Regarding the episodes themselves, Search and Rescue was good, The Seed was cliched and awful (wow, an alien parasite invades a character we've barely met? oh, the drama and originality...), Broken Ties was decent but pointless, and The Daedalus Variations had potential to be interesting but ended up falling flat. Given that there was no concern whether the characters would come back, they should have written something far more interesting than...whether or not the characters would come back. For example, did they do anything interesting while they were lost? Since it was one of the better episodes of the season so far, what does that tell you?

Ghost in the Machine was pretty good, but it definitely had flaws. The Replicators' threat of sinking the city if the humans didn't cooperate was stupid. Surely the Replicators knew that if the humans die, the humans couldn't help them...right? (Right?) I also, in general, dislike the scifi cliche of how entities possessing computers end up displaying text on the screen. Why do the letters show up one by one in a terminal-style font? Do they invoke a text editor and then "type" into it? Why not just manipulate the pixels directly, instantly showing a screenful of information, while, say, displaying their message in a flowing Edwardian script? Nevermind; that is a discussion for another time. The best part of the episode was how Michelle Morgan, who previously played the Replicator character "FRAN", portrayed Repli-Weir. She did an excellent job of imitating Torri Higginson's Weir's body language and vocal style. Also, since Higginson was not going to be back as Weir, the reason for Weir's appearing as Fran made sense and was a clever idea.

I have one major grievance with that episode. I am getting really, really sick of the following conversation template:

*crisis occurs; team is about to meet their doom*
Ronon/Sheppard/Teyla: Rodney, figure out what's wrong or we're all dead!
Rodney: I'm working on it! Just give me a minute!
Ro-Shep-Tey: We don't have a minute! Figure it out now! My yelling at you will force you to think faster!

That behavior was understandable in season 1: after all, the characters were in crises and were panicing, but now, it's just old. And annoying.

The latest episode, The Shrine, obviously brought back memories of season 3's Tao of Rodney, as it pretty much used the same formula: Rodney, the most arrogant and inconsiderate person on the expedition, gets an affliction which, at first, causes a personality change that is amusing but will ultimately kill him, and along the way, everyone realizes how much they care about each other. I went into both episodes not expecting them to be good, and both times, I was pleasantly surprised. Regarding The Shrine, seeing Rodney and Jeannie together is always fun, and Rodney, Jeannie, Sheppard, and Keller did a great job presenting a dramatic and emotional situation. (I was getting a bit misty-eyed towards the end, even though I expected a Star Trek ending.) My only serious complaint is that Zelenka needed to be in the episode more. I mean, if Rodney is going off to have one final day with the important people in his life, Zelenka should be there. And it would've provided a great "Rodney moment" at the Shrine, after he gained lucidity: he could've made a snarky comment about why, out of all the people in Atlantis, they thought they should bring Zelenka? ;)

Outlook hatred #3

You click Reply. You type some stuff. You click Save, to complete your draft another time. You close your unsent message. Outlook labels the original message -- the one you haven't yet sent your reply to -- as, "You replied on [date and time you clicked Save]." But you haven't actually clicked Send yet!

You go into your Drafts folder. You delete the draft. Outlook still labels your message as, "You replied on [date and time you clicked Save]," even though you not only never replied, but you have even deleted your unset response!

I can only imagine the misunderstandings this causes. "You never replied to my message!" "But I did reply! It says I replied!!"

How much do I hate Outlook? Let me count the ways.

Hatred #1: CTRL+ENTER: If you press this while editing a message, the message is immediately sent. It appears, based on a Google search, that the only way to get rid of this behavior is through (drumroll please) a registry hack. Srsly?? You know, in Thunderbird, there is an option to disable that. I found other workarounds, some more useful than others, such as setting a 1-2 minute delay on sending messages (so you have time to abort the send), a VB macro prompting you if you're really sure you want to send, and the most helpful one of all, not pressing CTRL+ENTER. Wow! If you don't like the way something works, don't do it? You don't say! I have an even better solution: Don't use Outlook at all! (I'm getting massive eye strain from rolling my eyes.)

Hatred #2: The reading pane. When I first started using Outlook at work, I was extremely irritated that when I would click on a message to read it, it would still be flagged as unread; I had to click on another message to mark it as read (or, right-click on it and select "Mark as Read"). I'm used to Thunderbird's behavior of marking an item as read immediately when I click on it. I finally found an option, buried DEEP in the maze-like settings:

Tools > Options > Other > Reading pane...
Reading pane options:
  [ ] Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane
    Wait [  ] seconds before marking item as read
  [x] Mark item as read when selection changes

"Awesome!", I thought. If I select Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane, then all I have to do is click on a message, and it will (after a few seconds, depending on the Wait # seconds... setting) be marked as read.

Then I found that if I was quickly skimming messages I was uninterested in, I wasn't "viewing" the message long enough for them to being flagged as read. No problem, I thought. I'll enable both reading pane options.

How naïve of me!

Despite the fact that the reading pane options are implemented as checkboxes, they behave like radio buttons: if you select one, the other one is immediately unselected. So, I can't select both "Mark items as read when viewed..." and "Wait # seconds before marking..."!! I mean, if it's too difficult for the code to allow both options (more eye strain), the options should at least be radio buttons.

Speaking of the reading pane, that reminds me of another irritation. (This isn't bad enough to warrent a Hatred, since it's a feature I never use.) If you right-click on an unread message, you see that "Mark as Read" is mapped to 'k'. Yet if you right-click on a read message, "Mark as Unread" is mapped to 'n'. So you can't simply remember that 'k' is a read/unread toggle. I wonder why they did that. My assumption is that they are implemented as separate menu items that are made visible or invisible depending on the message's status (read/unread), rather than a single item that's dynamically renamed depending on the message's status. And if they're separate items, then they can't be mapped to the same key. (I mean, it depends on the toolkit they used to develop Outlook, of course, but in my (admittedly limited) GUI experience, something like that could be changed with a callback/event function.)