I realise this blog is increasingly in danger of just becoming a list of celebrities whose deaths I’m sad about, but Stephen J. Cannell is one that really hit me hard.
When I was 10, my poor little brain couldn’t handle any celebrity or character with more than one name. For example, like most kids then, I loved The A-Team. And as fanatical as I was about that show, I still couldn’t manage their surnames. They were Murdock, Hannibal, Face and BA. No more, no less. I tried to remember BA’s surname, but I think I kept calling him “Balackus” or something. Maybe I was a little racist as a kid. I also used to think “Darth Vader” was called “Dark Vader”. You see, because he wore all blackSince I’m already in this hole of self-shame, I may as well dig a little deeper and say that I also used to think the “Standing strong forever” line in “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” was “Santa’s gone forever” because, y’know, Santa being gone means you’re all grown up. I had awesome logic..
Point is, you give me a celebrity or a character with two names, I was boned. In Knight Rider, I just knew the guy as “Michael”. I never once twigged that his surname was in the title. Durr.
But as much trouble as I had with names, I knew who the fuck Stephen J. Cannell was. With this one guy, I not only remembered his first name and his last name, but I fucking remembered his middle initial and everything. Know why? Because his logo came at the end of some of my favourite shows. And when I hear the jingle from his logo, I get a sort of pavlovian response. I feel happy. I feel like I’m 10 years old again. And I don’t just mean that in some hyperbolic way. I mean I literally feel 10 years old again. If I close my eyes and listen to that jingle, I feel like I’m sitting in front of our dodgy TV on a Saturday afternoon and now I’m going outside to recreate everything I just saw on TV.
Bagsy being BA.
Thanks, Stephen.
Bonus: Stephen J. Cannell also did a show called Tenspeed and Brownshoe starring Jeff Goldblum. This was less good. I bought the pilot on VHS for 50p a few years ago.
The New Yorker iPad app is out now. The app itself costs nothing, but the actual issues you buy through the app are $4.99 each. This is reasonable enough. I have a feeling we’ll see more magazines move to a similar model in the next year or so. From a publisher point of view, there are no more worries about printing and distribution costs. From an end-user point of view, there are no more worries about availability. Edge magazine, for example, is a right royal pain in the dick to get a hold of if you’re not living in the UK. With an iPad app, you’re getting all the content, in much the same format, with (potential) access to the entire back-catalogue at the touch of a button, with virtually no footprint for either the publisher or readermy collection of Edge magazine – going back 16 years or so – takes up an enormous amount of space. Win-win.
Except for people who are already subscribers, that is. As Kottke points out:
Current magazine subscribers appear to have no option but to buy a completely separate issue if they wish to read the magazine on the iPad. As a subscriber, what exactly am I paying for if I already have the content in magazine form? Is the $4.99 simply a convenience fee?
One of the things I really liked about David Wellington’s Monster Island was that it was also available online. When I was in work and didn’t have the book with me, I could just go to Wellington’s website and take up where I left off. I suppose the same could be said of any of Cory Doctorow’s books as well. Although I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, I have a physical copy of Makers on my bookshelf and a digital copy of on my e-reader.
As things like smart phones and e-readers become more and more a part of our everyday life, I would love to see us get to stage where buying a physical copy of a thing – movies, magazines, films – entitles you to a digital copy of the thing as well. We’re sort of seeing this with blu-ray, where a lot of discs come bundled with a digital copy of the film as wellThen again, in most cases, that’s being implemented in such a half-assed, braindead way (where the ‘digital edition’ it comes bundled with is just an access key to download a copy once) it makes you wonder if the movie studios aren’t deliberately sabotaging this effort so they can say “look! There’s no demand for the digital edition!”.
When I was younger, I remember looking at my grown-up relatives and dreaming about when I’d finally be finished with school and start working a 9 to 5 job. I figured that, coming home from work and not having any homework to do, I’d have buckets of free time to play videogames and watch kick-ass movies.
In an interview with IGN, BioWare revealed some of the stats they’ve collected about people’s Mass Effect 2 habits. Interestingly, half of the players imported their game from the first Mass Effect and only half of the players actually finished Mass Effect 2. Much more interestingly is the revelation that four Xbox players completed the game 23 times.
Considering they also say that the average time to complete a game of Mass Effect 2 is 33 hours, that means these four people spent roughly 32 solid days of their life playing this game. That’s almost five weeks. Solid.
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