Author: James Aylett

Well, I was originally going to wait until all three episodes came out of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog before commenting, but thanks to James you’ll get my inexpert opinion early. Right now, in fact.

First, as James points out, it’s not the best thing Joss Whedon has done. It’s not Hush, it’s not Objects In Space, it’s not Once More With Feeling. But we have all of them already, so frankly who cares? Dr Horrible is still a joyous little slice of Internetdom, and if you haven’t gone to see it yet, or if you have but failed because of their server issues, then go there now. And if they have server issues again, keep on going until you see it.

Now for the bad things.

• Act I is clearly the first part of a single episode. On TV we’d see it all at once; on the Internet, with the bits coming out separately, it doesn’t quite seem to pace right. This will no doubt work better with Act II, because it’ll have the cliff-hanger, and Act III will slot it all together. So that’s, you know, coming along.
• The server going down, which probably wasn’t their fault but their ISP’s. But really, even though this is really just a bunch of creative people having fun and producing good product, someone should have thought about that. The ISP, probably.
• Sometimes, the budget (almost nothing) shows. Rarely, because the people working on it are top-notch, but there are a few times where things aren’t perfect. Most people probably won’t notice, but I’m obsessive about that, and spending far too much of my time thinking about where to shave money from film budgets for the web myself.
• Speaking of budget: no one other than Joss Whedon could have done this. (Or almost no one.) The number of highly talented people happy to jump on board without getting paid is what made this; sure, it’d still be fun if it was just Joss and his family, but it wouldn’t look professional. Getting Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day made it work. Getting Shawna Trpcic to costume design. Getting Lisa Lassek to edit.
• It’s not going to change the industry. A look at comparative searches for Dr Horrible compared to Dollhouse, or even for Joss Whedon himself, shows it’s barely registering. Although it will be talked about a lot inside the industry, and although I’m confident that it will actually turn a profit, this itself isn’t going to change much. It’s part of a wider movement, though, so let’s keep paying attention, even if you think LonelyGirl is annoying. Which it is.

But these are gripes, they aren’t complaints. I watched it twice, and I was smiling inside. And outside. And in Sainsbury’s, when I went shopping. Watch it. Then watch it again. Then go to bed, have a dull day at work, go to bed (again), and wake up to Act II. Watch that a lot, watch the first one again a few times, sleep a bit, and it’ll be time for Act III. Seriously, what else do you have to do with your time?

If you did, you’d be scarred for life. Yes, it’s true: old ladies are knitting breasts (presumably some other people are as well, but not pictured). These are training aids, to teach pregnant women how to prepare their breasts for lactation. (No, really.) Even better, you can rent the knitting pattern from the Eastleigh Library for just 20p. Also available: baby’s first poop, doting father, and interfering mother-in-law patterns.

I assume there will be even more on display at this month’s international knitting conference In The Loop, starting next Tuesday in Winchester.

The man is utterly crazy. But very funny with it.

Just watch this. And then, you know, never be able to sleep again.

I’ve just had Barclaycard’s online insecurity check decide I’m not me… while listening to John Finnemore’s sketch about credit card security codes.

I hate reality. At least John’s world has jokes.

Some people may have previously been aware of Heil Honey, I’m Home, a 1990 British sitcom cancelled – for some reason – after only one episode. Apparently it helps to know that it’s satirising 1930s politics within the context of a parody of US 1950s sitcoms…

In a lengthy panegyric on the joys of bacon, this:

I’m glad that fairy tales don’t use bacon as a force for bad.

God, now I’m hungry.

Hulu is a new (ish) service intended to bring the best content for you, to you, on the web. I’ve always been slightly surprised no one’s come anywhere close to doing this right yet (there are a few competitors, most of which seem to be very shiny but I haven’t actually seen achieve very much), but honestly the most surprising thing on the Hulu site is where they categorise Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a “TV classic”.

So Zhura are the second screenwriting-software-for-free-online to pop up recently (and the first which doesn’t require you to be in the US or Canada – because obviously screenplays don’t travel well over the internet if they stray too far from Hollywood). Go there. Watch the little video.

Oh.

My.

Seriously, there’s a video of two people each trying to write a screenplay, who give up and shred their work, only to run into each other in what we could charitably call a hallway but is clearly just the bit of landing between their two bedrooms. They realise that putting their two efforts together they can create a jim dandy screenplay. Or at least one page of one. It’s unclear what their original problems were (I think they were just using the wrong colour paper), but obviously working together helped them resolve those niggling difficulties and lack of overall talent. Voila: screenplay!

Zhura are focussed on collaboration, so you put up your idea, screenplay, whatever, and license it so that other people can contribute. Obviously you all retain copyright for whatever work you do on it, which will just make it pretty much impossible that anybody would ever actually pay for it (also I suspect WGA arbitration is gonna kick in automatically if you even mention Zhura in future).

None of this bothers me, really, since I’m just looking for an easy way to type up scripts. It doesn’t seem too bad, although the formatting options are limited, but the idea’s good and it’s easy to use. Of course I didn’t entrust anything I actually care about to it – so I gave up after two scenes based on an idea I pretty much typed in without thinking. I’ve made the idea public, in the hope that it will appeal to writers who don’t have any talent, thus thinning the gene pool somewhat. It’s called “Agent Elsie”, and the pitch is:

Elsie is a fourth grade teacher. While sitting at home one night thinking up ideas for a class history project, she is visited by the shadowy Colonel Raven, who says that the military needs her help. He is killed before he can explain all the details, prompting Elsie to run from his killers, to Fort Lauderdale, discovering along the way secrets about her family and upbringing that she had never considered.

It is quite possibly the worst idea I’ve ever had. Think of it as Private Benjamin meets The Long Kiss Goodnight. Or The Shadow Men meets the last scene of Out of Mind, Out of Sight. In an alternate universe where the US military conducts all its secret operations in Miami.

So expect to see it at a multiplex near you in summer 2009.

Real pirates carry cutlasses. (Via Bruce Schneier.)