Prediction!

Come 2008, George W. Bush is going to claim that he has the legal authority to stay in office "until the war on terror is over".

Yes, yes, I know some of you will say "never going to happen!" and damn, I hope you're right. But if you follow the logic he's using today, he has all the power he needs to set himself up as a dictator. A lot of power hungry people and ignorant constituents will fall right in line behind him.

A great article on a great author

A profile in the New Yorker of noted atheist and author Philip Pullman and his fantasy trilogy based on principles of The Enlightenment.

Fantasy authors are very anti-institutional these days. It almost gives you hope for the children. :)

Alas, the experiment fails

Firefly dies.

Some would have said that Firefly was kind of a test - to see if direct-to-DVD productions could succeed. But I guess there just isn't any channel for direct to consumer content yet, despite "cult" status and following. It wasn't enough to sell DVDs. It wasn't enough to sell DVDs and drive viewers to a feature film - and mainly I think it's because costs run so high with these traditional productions; right now shows really can only survive on ad revenue and mass broadcasting rather than direct sales and personal narrowcasting.

It costs a lot of money to press discs, create packaging, and ship. It costs a lot money to advertise on tv and distribute film canisters. The numbers just aren't there, the commodity price of a DVD or movie ticket can't offset production value and distribution cost.

So how do you solve this problem? You have to drive down production cost and drive down distribution cost. The tools and channels are only just now being created to enable this: podcasting, iTunes, bit torrents. It's coming, but it will be a couple more years before we'll really see truly "customized" fan-driven programming. And have no doubt, it will be on a subscription basis - you will have to sign up and pay up front if you want to see your show made, and you will have to work hard to get others to do the same.

You Want This

Go to http://www.pandora.com/ and sign up for it. It's pretty nifty. I've already discovered some neat new music.