Death of a Salesnerd

The title of today's rant is rather stupid considering I can't so much as bring myself to request money in return for anything, but there's still an analogy to be made. Oh, and the first portion of this rant is pure self indulgent whining so you should really skip down to the little divider if you aren't into that sort of thing... and if you ARE into that sort of thing I don't appreciate demons that feed off human misery using me for a free meal. Click that little donation button and give me what you'd have to pay a restaurant tanjit! Oh yeah, and skip down past the second divider if you're sick of hearing people talk about Farscape lately.

There is this strange train of thought that comes from the land of heavy handed metaphors but somehow seeped into the mainstream. Anyway, the gist of it is, everyone has a list of reasons to live, some longer than others. If things start to be removed from this list, you start to die. I've always written this off as a cliché used by hack writers, but lately some of MY reasons to live have been winking out, and I seem to be displaying a distressing number of physical symptoms.

First there was WarCraft 3. For the two years or so it was in production I was sitting here hunting info on it two or three times a day, memorizing every detail, grilling the developers at E3, and getting it so ingrained into my psyche that I made a D&D of every race without even realizing it. All of this because I knew that it would be a tremendous improvement over the last *Craft game, which is debatably the most enjoyable gaming experience out there. Yeah, I'm hooked, I know. Anyway, when the game came out, I got a copy of it. I installed it on my computer, to double check exactly how big of a RAM upgrade I'd need to run it, and I made an unpleasant discovery. Another component of my computer needed upgrading. One which, do to my having a computer which was only in my price range because it was a mass-produced space efficient model, is fused to the motherboard. Ironically, many people I know have the same model of computer, but just happened to buy theirs during the 4 month period when the component in question was sufficient. So, no big deal. I just can't play the game I've been obsessing over for 2 years and all my friends are ignoring me to play. It happens.

Next there was my cousin heading away to college like I mentioned a couple weeks ago. It took a little while for the impact of that one to sink in. Between him heading to college, and another friend of mine moving to Boston, I no longer have any friends with which to play games. Here's when the death thing starts to kick in. I cut my leg on a bit of metal sticking out of the back of a car seat in front of me that day, and it has yet to heal.

Last week, I mentioned there were rumors flying around that Farscape, the only show on TV I actually consider Good, and not just Somewhat Amusing, had been cancelled. I said I wouldn't believe this until I saw confirmation. The day after I posted that rant, someone gave me some confirmation. Not only did Sci-Fi cancel it (presumably because they plan to phase out original programming in favor of showing only the cheap garbage they get from other networks), but they gave the creators the cancellation notice as they were finishing the shoot of the season finale. For those of you unaware of the fact, Farscape is a serial, with multiple plot lines being carried around from a good four years ago, fond of ending each season with such a huge cliffhanger that they throw in the large breaks in new episodes in BEFORE the finales so fans don't go insane waiting to see what happens. In other words, not only will the show be ending prematurely, but ending with a huge frelling cliffhanger which will go unresolved. Since hearing that, my body temperature seems to have dropped several degrees, and I now suffer from vertigo. Admittedly, having the direction in which gravity pulls suddenly tilt 90 degrees for half a second is actually kind of cool, but the point is if I heard tomorrow that Shigeru Miyamoto had died (*knocks on wood*), I would not be at all surprised if my legs suddenly ceased to function.

Quick review there for those skimming. No favorite game+No favorite show+2 states between me and my nearest friend=mysterious illness. Anyway, on with the happy stuff!

As mentioned in that block of text none of you should have read, towards the end of last week's rant, in every magazine, newspaper, and other publication I have seen lately, and on many web sites I've been to, the Sci-Fi Channel has decided to unceremoniously pull the plug on Farscape. The bad news here is that that's a concept so horrific it has half the people I know contemplating suicide and I don't blame'em. The good news is, the odds actually look pretty good right now that I won't be wearing black for a year.

The thing about Farscape is that it is the only example I can think of of a truly GOOD Science Fiction series since the original Twilight Zone, and I may be speaking overly kind of TZ there. When it comes to Sci-Fi on TV, there's really only three main types of series you're going to see:

• Shows that take a one simple Sci-Fi premise and run with it- A number of these actually have a good deal of promise to them. A simple idea, explored in depth, with sufficient character development, can make for a very enjoyable series. Unfortunately, that is not what these shows do. They take their simple concept, and stretch their exploration of it out as far as they possibly can, because they know if they share everything with their audience at a timely rate, there show will be over in just a season or two. So instead, we get these long slow drawn out shows which barely touch their own premises, and really don't go anywhere at all. This also gives the X-Files that long painful drawn out death where even the actors got sick of things before the end.
• Terrible knockoffs of The Twilight Zone, such as The Outer Limits- A collection of trite clichéed Sci-Fi short stories, stretched out into hour long episodes, with a "surprise" ending you can see coming about 3 seconds into the episode (largely do to the fact that 95% of the time, the surprise is that the main character is being studied by aliens). Then of course the whole thing is topped off by an unbelievably stupid and irrelevant moral at the end.
• Terrible knockoffs of Star Trek- For that matter, Star Trek itself. I realize that uttering this in public will unleash a violent horde of my fellow nerds on me, but Star Trek really isn't that much to write home about. Granted, the original series had the occasional intriguing and thought provoking episode, but for each really good episode, you have to admit there was a piece of garbage in there too. Like the episode where they were transporting around a bunch of hippies who forced Spock to sing a DECIDEDLY dated song with them, or when they took a failed pilot of another series and made a half-hearted effort at rewriting it into a Trek script. Oh, and then of course there's the huge continuity errors, the static characters, the half-hearted efforts at portraying alien races, and naturally all of these flaws are far worse in the myriad spin-offs and imitators.

Farscape, unlike these other shows, is not a mediocre series which nerds worship for not being a complete waste of their time like the bulk of the genre. It's a real, honest to goodness, Good Show. The production values are higher than most movies. The aliens are not just humans with funny noses, and are often not even remotely human shaped. The pacing is fast, with plenty of shocking twists in the plot. If one of the main characters dies in the middle of an episode, it will not be overturned by a cheap deus ex machina before the hour is up. There is not a single unwritten rule of television the series will not break, and there is not one episode the viewer can miss without fear of missing a plot point which will be brought up later. More importantly, even if one were to remove every science fiction aspect from the series, one would still be left with one of the best written and best acted dramas in the history of television, which still manages to keep enough of a sense of humor to keep from becoming an angst-fest. Furthermore, this is not just the opinion of some lonely obsessive nerd. These are the same sentiments expressed by nearly everyone who has ever sat down to watch the series, including noted critics, authors, dispensers of awards, and even executives of the company which has decided to take it off the air. If you don't believe me, look for some of their reactions to this news.

To put all of this in simpler terms, and return to my earlier point, allow me to use an analogy. Picture the fans of Farscape as a mangy stray dog, which has been barely sustaining itself on what small half-rotten bits of meat found in dumpsters. Now picture Farscape as a big thick juicy porterhouse which accidentally slipped out of someone's groceries right in front of this dog. Cancelling Farscape is a bit like trying to take that steak away from that dog. There's a decent chance you'll lose your hand, so you should probably just let the poor beast finish.

Continuing with this analogy, the dog that is the fans has seriously been growling and snapping at the hand of Sci-Fi this week. Rants like this are cropping up in pretty much every publication out there, and there's some serious letter writing campaigns and petitions going around, not to mention a group evidently holding weekly protest rallies outside Sci-Fi's HQ. At this point the worst case scenario in my mind is that Sci-Fi sells the rights off to a network I don't get.

There were some other things I planned to address in this rant, but seeing as I intended everything above this line to have been like two paragraphs total, the raging storm outside, and the general sentiment in the air of "It's 5 AM! Go to sleep you sicko!" I'll have to cut things short. Here is my update to another page for the week. I haven't tested it what with the no friends bit, so it may or may not be fun. In any case, come back next week for a rant which will most likely be titled "HARD CORE NUDITY!" ... and thus disappoint anyone who comes across it whilst searching for smut.