The second last episode of Farscape, one of the greatest sci-fi series ever, will air tonight on Space. The ending of this series is nothing new to most, but since Space was so far behind the airing schedule of Sci-Fi, I really didn’t feel the loss of the show until today. The loss of Farscape is going to be very hard to handle; for the last 86 weeks I have joined my friends aboard Moya and watched their crazy, insane world unfold. The actions the characters took made sense, and changes in the continually evolving characters interesting to watch.

In my opinion, Farscape is easily on the same tier as one would put Star Wars (Episodes 4 through 6), Babylon 5, Star Trek The Next Generation, Doctor Who, Enterprise, and Firefly. Farscape, like most science fiction shows, has its own unique feel, but in the case of Farscape, it is a very off-kilter feel. The characters live in a realm defined more by the fantastic than the scientific, something that is unique among space-based science fiction. The universe has a more alien feel through the show’s use of animatronics, puppets, and subtle oddities such as characters that are of strange colours and shapes, robots, sentient bacteria, and living ships. These all combine to create an almost magical feel that permeates the screen.

The Farscape universe is distinctly unique, but the environment and mood of a show does not necessarily guarantee an amazing show. Farscape’s core cast of characters and their relations further strengthens its uniqueness. Characters, similar to the ones presented in Farscape, are central to the success of a continual science fiction story line. The synergy between the characters is amazing to see. The older Star Wars movies, the ones with Luke, Han, Chewie, and Leia, had rich characters that made the events they were involved more important to audience, that the audience cared whether they succeeded or failed. The newer Star Wars movies, even though they still have the same “good vs. evil” theme, have less of an impact on the audience due to the lack of one central character group. In the new movies, the characters are more individualistic and seems to act on their own more then they act together… simply put, they don’t mesh together. The first trilogy was not about individual characters, but rather the group in its entirety and their interactions with each other that contributed to the bigger-than-oneself events around them that, ultimately, destroyed the Empire. Farscape’s core group of disparate characters were thrown together by fate and end up challenging powers greater than themselves not by choice, but through circumstance (mostly Crichton pointing a gun at the wrong person but meh). The amazing part about Farscape is that while they are all working together, our “heroes” aren’t always working toward the same goals. While it is sometimes a frustrating plot device, it has a ring of truth for all but the most structured group environments.

Out of all the characters presented in the show, I find the human character Crichton and the ex-Dominar of the Hynerian Empire, Rygel XVI the most interesting. Crichton goes from being one of the top in his field (scientist and astronaut) to fish-out-of-water baggage. Throughout the first season he adapts to the oddity around him and by the second season has gained the respect of his fellow fugitives and begins to thrive in his new surroundings. In effect, Crichton adapts to and overcomes the insane situation into which he was thrust. No matter how hard things get, he never gives up. In essence, Crichton becomes the person everyone wished they were, the epitome of Humanity. Rygel, in contrast, is a character that doesn’t fit in for a completely different reason, he is interested in his own well being over that of others. Rygel is the best example of character development in Farscape. He goes from a self-serving creature that could care nothing for others to a being that looks, at first glance, to be same self-serving cretin until you realize he does truly care about his shipmates (many examples of this exist starting near the end of the second season). One of the best examples of this was in the episode “We’re So Screwed (part 1): Fetal Attraction”. Noranti, the “witch doctor” of Moya almost kills Rygel and accidentally kills many others in an attempt to help free Aeryn from the clutches of the Scarrans. At the end, she is confessing the guilt that her irresponsible actions indirectly killed a lot of people. Rygel is quiet for a moment and softly replies, “Welcome to Moya”. While this may not sounds like a major shift, old Rygel would have never been in the situation that almost killed him for he wouldn’t have risked his life to help rescue Aeryn. The part I liked the best about the scene was the pause, the contemplation that he too has caused the death of many innocents before and after joining the crew of Moya. It was really touching in my opinion.

This is not to say Farscape is beyond criticism but overall, I really enjoy the writing behind the series. Occasionally, there is an episode that seems to slip, but these were rare. Farscape is a sci-fi show that should be destined to be a classic, and the reason why is because it focused much more on the people than the science. I have had to say goodbye to a lot of series in the past, many of the cancelled, but this is the first that I truly shocked that someone decided to cancel. Farscape will be missed.

Believe it or not, I think I have proof that the city planners in Regina could be worse. Yes, I know it is hard to believe, but take a look for yourself:

Do you work with lazy people? Do you work with people who don’t refill the coffee pot when they empty it? Do you work with people who simply won’t stop socializing or take hour long coffee breaks? If you answer yes to any of these questions, Terry Tate is for you. For more information, click here.

“That’s not a knife. That’s a knife.”

— Crocodile Dundee

The PC market has always been like the scene from Crocodile Dundee. A mugger pulls a knife on the Aussie who simply sneers at the length of the blade. “That’s not a knife. That’s a knife,” and he whips out a 2-foot-long bowie knife. With the release of the Apple G5, Apple now has the biggest knife in the personal computer market … and what a masterful blade it is. I’ve been waiting with a great bit of impatience for the release of AMD’s Athlon-64’s, which should have been out by now, and the release of the Apple G5 just nailed me on my blindside. The last I had heard they were not getting these out until next January; looks like Apple pulled a fast one like Sony just did with their Blu-Ray recorder.

In any case, the performance benchmarks of the first mass-produced 64-bit processor are impressive to say the least. The new G5’s beat the sh*t out of the dual Pentium IV 3.0 GHz, which it should considering it has another exponentional on computing power. 64-bit processors are king of the floating point which means things like XviD encoding and MP3 compression are infinitely faster on a 64-bit processor, even if it is of slower clock speed. All very cool.

Okay, so what about the G5 that is so impressive. Let’s talk about the architecture of the mobo itself. To start with you can now dump 8 GB of RAM into it, thanks to removal the the 32-bit 4GB restriction. The system also features dual-1GHz front-side bus (1 GHz!), three dual-channel 400MHz memory sockets, the new 133-MHz PCI-X expansion slots, SATA, and Firewire800.

And yes Fyn, I am impressed even if you are not. A Duron-650 is not even sufficient for me, even right now. To quote the great B-Movie Split Second¹: “We need bigger guns. BIG FUCKING GUNS! We’re gonna go get big guns, right? That’s where we’re going, to get big guns. Stone, we need some big big fucking guns!”. With that said though, I’m still waiting for the Athlon-64’s … I’m just more excited now

[1]: Split Second is the perfect futuristic movie. It is dark, depressing, with constant rain, and best of all a psychotic killer who steals human hearts. Additionally, the protagonists are only a little less psychotic: “He went over the edge. Now he lives on anxiety, coffee, and chocolate.” (in reference to Harley Stone to his new, very green partner, Dirk Durkin). Dirk Durkin was essentially there to “watch over” Harley Stone … the quote I gave earlier was Dirk much later in the movie. I should really Buy It.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU SENT IT OUT FOR DELIVERY AGAIN!”
— Me about 2 hours ago on the phone with a nice lady at UPS

I hate dealing with UPS. Besides the fact that they have their only depot up on Lenard St. (in the Ross Industrial Park here in Regina), they close at 6pm and are not open on weekends. This would be acceptable if the staff at the depot were not the dreges of society who exist soley to make me, one of UPS’ customers, feel like strangling them. They are intentionally stupid. They do stupid things and this is not the first time this annoyance has occured. Everytime I deal with them it is like having teeth pulled (and I know both so the comparision is valid: both leave you feeling less happy with your day, and hurts a lot).

On the third delivery attempt, they are supposed to take the package back to the depot and hold it for five days before sending it back (unless it is a COD which this isn’t). Some “nice” person there decided to delivery it again today (for a fourth time), and screwed up all my plans to pick it up at lunch. Now I’m going to have to ditch out of work earlier then I wanted to so I can pick up the damned webcam. ARGH!

I imagine these as being created by a bored student.

Why is it that most of the flash animation on the Internet seems to be a contest for most creative mutilation a la Itchy and Scratchy?

Reuters via ABC: U.S. forces have killed three Iraqis during shelling of a remote village on the border near Syria, an Arabic television channel reported Friday.

An Iraqi woman, her child and an Iraqi man died during the operation in the village of Maqarr al-Dheeb, located in the desert some 10 miles from Syria, Dubai-based al-Arabiya said.

“There is an intense military presence here now which has cordoned off the district,” a correspondent inside the village told the channel, adding that the shelling destroyed six homes.

U.S. personnel said U.S. forces, had received information that armed men were in the area, the correspondent said.

I ran across this article purely by accident. Harry Potter’s new book has been causing a lot of news over the last month and a bit. There have been a few cases of retailers unintentionally violating the release date. Wal-Mart Canada (in Montreal) released the new Harry Potter book on the 12th and Smith’s Discount books in the US released the book early as well. Both of these companies have realized their error and removed the book from the shelves. The book’s scheduled release is 12:01 on Saturday the 21st. These mistakes, though, are minor. Thieves stole a truck on Sunday from outside a warehouse in Newtown-le-Willows in northern England. The truck was packed with 7,680 books, worth £130,000, but while the truck was recovered undamaged within the hour, it was empty. But the weirdness involving the new book didn’t begin there. On May the 6th, a man walking his dog found two copies complete of the book a park, with its pages still not cut (he turned them over to the police) and the next day The Sun (a tabloid) was contacted by “a shifty man” wanting to sell them the first three chapters of the book. The Sun reported it to the Suffolk police and the next day they had arrested the four men involved in the theft of the pages (including a forklift operator at Clays Printers in Bungay. Clays is the primary printer the new book in England).

All the hype over this book appears to concern two things. JK Rowlings killed off a main character in it and you find out why Voldemort killed Harry’s parents. Apparently these two things have been kept secret to such a degree that it hasn’t leaked yet. That is incredible security … talking about security, security has been increased at all warehouses containing the new Harry Potter book.

I’m not sure if I should be disgusted that people are stealing books … or happy ’cause it at least means people are reading. Any suggestions?

As you may recall from my comments on Fyn’s Article on Gnod, I was looking for music by Pzychobitch, mostly ’cause Gnod suggested it. Well, at the time the Pzychobitch homepage was down. It’s back, and I do like their music … well at least the three low-quality clips they have on their website.