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JMS and Wachowskis Teaming Up for New Netflix Funded Scifi Series
Via Engadget, comes a press release that might bring joy to fans of science fiction dismayed by years without any new scifi shows: "Continuing its quest to sate subscribers' appetites with a flow of original content, Netflix has announced a new original series, Sense8. Due in late 2014, it's being developed by the Wachowskis of The Matrix, V for Vendetta, Cloud Atlas and Speed Race fame, as well as J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5. Details are thin, but the press release promises a gripping global tale of minds linked and souls hunted with a ten episode run for its first season."
Hopefully it'll end up available on DVD eventually, for us poor GNU/Linux users who are not worthy enough for Netflix (or: to any Netflix engineers reading, make it work).
You might want to read the news... http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/11/03/16/1836233/netflix-to-start-creating-original-content House of Cards was the first series and is top notch. Amazon is doing the same thing (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417007,00.asp), as is Youtube (http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/17/2043252/original-content-coming-to-youtube) and Hulu (http://blog.hulu.com/2013/01/08/2013-original-and-exclusive-series-preview/). This is one of the most exciting trends in video entertainment today.
Netflix has been working in wine for quite a while.
http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/netflix-on-ubuntu-is-here.html
Way to be out of date slashdot.
Huh, that's going to be one seriously polished series.
Ezekiel 23:20
So just going from past history...
JMS = doesn't really start to hit his stride until the second season.
Wachowskis = each part of an episodic thing they work on is worse than the one that came before
So either the strengths of one will compensate for the weaknesses of the other, or it's going to start out as on okay show with some promise but a lot of problems to overcome and then go downhill from there.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
They have been trying to start producing their own content for a couple years now. It was mentioned in the article, but i am excited they are bringing back Arrested Development as part of that effort.
Who still watches netflix on their computers, anyways? At least half the blu-ray players on the market today can play netflix out of the box. Every major game console can as well. Quite a few TVs have it built-in now, too. Why on earth would you want to watch it on your computer?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Honestly, it sounds ... well, it has potential anyway. I seriously enjoyed three of the four movies mentioned (let's just play pretend and say that fourth one never happened, mmmkay?)
Fringe is over after a good run, V was canceled just as it was getting really good and there's not much else out there I can find with as much character depth.
Bring it on!
Even worse, look at the editor bitching about Netflix not working on Linux when it's a solved problem.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
AMC was just doing what its name suggests, running old movies, until they started with Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Walking Dead. So this model can produce good stuff.
First our hands are in every pocket, now we're isolationists. Fuck you.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Do you also complain when people say RMS, or ESR?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
JMS was JMS before Java Messaging Service. And probably has more internet acclaim than java messaging does as well.
Dang, JMS was on GEnie yes, before the world wide web was even popular. Hell, JMS predates Java itself
Sorry your failed at your nerdiness...
The Spam problem has been somewhat annoying, and when I saw the opportunity to keep the bot from locking in the first spot I jumped on it. And then followed up with an on-topic reply to self to give the community a place to comment guaranteed to be above the bot. It appears to be working.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
Wait....did you just say you're interested to see if they can do better than Jersey Shore and Honey Boo Boo? Seriously?
House of cards is moderately good -- better than most TV fare -- but underplays the level of corruption in Washington. We haven't seen any depiction of entrenched values and religious fuckery, either, and those are part and parcel of Washington's current operations.
In the SF vein, news that would make me (and a lot of other people, I'm guessing) smile is someone pulling Firefly back together. IMHO, that show was the most consistently well done SF show ever. It had everything; it was quirky enough to be interesting just from a plot-assembly POV, it was often very funny, almost everyone had a great role (River's the exception, but it's pretty clear they were developing her slowly) and, oh, I don't know, a host of other things. A touch of genius, certainly. Perhaps several.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I thought Lillyhammer was the first series?
I think the great thing about House of Cards is that it's the first TV Series I've seen that didn't have to go through all the censors or ratings boards whatsoever. I think this allows them to make it more true to life. There's swearing, drugs, violence, and even some brief nudity. Also, because it wasn't made for TV, each episode is exactly as long as it needs to be. It rarely seemed like they added content simply because they needed to make the episode longer.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, I meant "do better than something I'd be prone to watch from the traditional producers of the televised media." I have no intention of comparing anything to either of those shows due to the fact my sense of integrity would require me to actually seek out and experience them first hand. -shudder-
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
Even if you can't get Netflix working under Linux, you can always buy an AppleTV or Roku box for under $100 and run Netflix on that. The experience is superior anyway, no plugins or updates, Netflix runs really well and you can easily attach it to any TV.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If by "solved" you mean that a software engineer grad student and his pocket protector stand an even chance of knocking it out in a spare weekend then yes my good sir, that problem is solved.
Assuming most people can copy/paste, it is extremely easy.
Open a terminal from the menu and paste "sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio" Enter your password when prompted. Then "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install netflix-desktop"
It is now installed in your programs menu.
I really don't see how this is more difficult then installing in windows.
JMS is an atheist from what I can tell in the various things he's posted on the internet (he's done a lot of online discussions). I think he included relgious and metaphysical stuff in B5 to show how people latch onto religious ideas and values and use them to guide their actions because that is a real phenomenon regardless of whether you believe in the reality espoused by a given religion. Religious ideas have a hand in driving all sorts of conflicts in the real world (and conflicts are important elements of stories).
iOS I can understand but in what way is Mac OS X a walled garden?
I run several flavors of Linux at home and work and am disappointed that Netflix doesn't work natively under Linux. Rather than fudging around with a virtual machine or trying to get things working under Wine, I walked into my local electronics store and paid $70 for a nice blu-ray, internet enabled player. A Smart TV box. I now watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube and more without taking a hit on my laptop performance.
JMS produced Babylon-5 for 5 years on a shoe-string budget with his own production company for an impoverished basic cable channel. I don't see why he'd have a lot of trouble pulling off the same feat for Netflix.
Yup. JMS has stated he doesn't believe in God, and the rest of parent post is dead on as well. However, he does acknolwedge that religon exists, and even did some speculation into what that would look like with alien species. That's the kind of thing Sci-Fi is supposed to do. What he didn't do is ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist, like was done in Star Trek.
GP was essentially complaining that B5 wasn't Trek. It his perrogative to prefer that narrative I suppose, but it doesn't make other narratives bad. At any rate, this is an argument most of us tired of a decade and a half ago. If you only want to watch Trek universe shows, please just go do that already and leave the rest of us alone.
Not to mention expensive to do properly.
You have to postulate working anti-gravity without acknowledging the ramifications of that technology. Or spend more on wirework and/or CGI than can be coped with by a standard show's budget.
And you have to find plots that haven't been done before. Without resorting to reversing the polarity of the neutron flow or getting this cheese to Sickbay. There's what, about 800 episodes of Trek in all its incarnations, plus Galactica old and new, Babylon 5, and stuff that only made very short runs, S:AAB, Space Rangers etc.
All the science fiction from the last decade I can think of is earth-based, and I don't think it's because it's easier or cheaper to make, although it probably is. I think much of it is because any time someone comes up with an idea for a space-based series, it just sounds like Star Trek, The Nth Generation, or Babylon 6.
sigh If you're going to start up a 10 year old argument, at least look into what has been said before.
The Mimbari believed in that soul stuff. That doesn't make it true, just true for them. In fact, if you watched the episode Soul Hunter, you would have seen another species that believed very differently than the Mimbari about souls (with the predictable unblinking hatred from the Mimbari, much like you see from many other religons when their practices are incompatible, for example Mormon post-mortem "babptisims" of people who were other faiths in life).
JMS was a atheist, but one who at the time was interested what he could say about religon and intolerance if he made the (not unreasonable) postulation that spacefaring species might retain that part of their cultural heritage. His Narn had a totally different religon, and his human characters all had their own different beliefs, some old (Ivonova was Jewish), some new (Their male doctor was an adherent of some kind of multispecies Universalist church created after space travel), and various characters had their own levels of belief or disbelief in religon. Just like people today. What a concept!
Again, if you prefer Trek's treatment of religon, that's fine. Go watch that. But it doesn't make another author's treatment of it wrong.
Nonsense. Religion isn't going away, nor should it. Roddenberry's biases is one aspect of his work that dates it. In general, one of Scifi's greatest flaws is despite its portrayal of fascinating scenarios and technological wonders it is difficult to apply to actual people because its main characters are often not people. Instead they are agnostic idealogues that come across as shallow. Its wooden/unrealistic portrayal of human depth due to many authors who insist in creating a caricature of religion for the sake of either making it either a cliche'd villain or the elimination of meaning altogether makes many of the great ideas presented therein flawed...
Good scifi takes into account that intelligent people can and do acknowlege a higher power without turning all evil or into one-dimensional automatons.
http://www.beanleafpress.com