Post-apocalyptic tv experiment

Have any of you watched The Colony? It's a reality series about volunteers trying to survive in a warehouse in a post-apocalyptic environment. There are ten volunteers of different backgrounds: three different kinds of engineers, a personal trainer, a handyman, and some other people. We've been watching it and I'm finding myself liking it more every week.

There are a variety of experts who weigh in on different issues that come up during this experiment. Even though there are cameras and whatnot, the participants seem to be taking the experiment quite seriously - as if they really believe they're living in a post-apocalyptic world.

The fact that the participants really believe that they're in a post-apocalyptic world makes this series quite interesting. There are personality conflicts, priority conflicts, and "attacks" from outside that they need to defend against.

It's clear that several of these people are feeling like they don't have something to contribute to the efforts because they're picking a lot of fights and working on what seems to be trivial projects. I'd like to think that if I was there I could calm people down, but I know that I can lose my temper just as easily as those people.

I'm a huge fan of post-apocalyptic fiction and cinema and this show makes the challenges people face in that situation more real. This in turn will make me be better prepared for the zombie apocaplyse, whenever it comes.

Superbowl Sunday

We went to a friend's house to watch the Superbowl. The New Orleans Saints surprised me by winning 31-17 over the Indianapolis Colts. This was the first year the Saints have ever played at the Superbowl and they were down by 10 in the first quarter. Statistically, very few teams down by 10 in the first quarter go on to win. And how many teams win the first year they play? Not many.

I often wish that I could watch the US commercials instead of the Canadian ones because they're so much more innovative and interesting. This year I think I'm happier not having seen some of the ads this year, however. For the first time, CBS allowed pro-life ads for a Focus on the Family, a rightwing Christian pro-life group. CNN and NBC both rightly refused to play the ads. The fact that the ads featured the mother of a quarterback doesn't mean that they should have played during the Superbowl, does it?

I know that the ad never mentioned abortion, but it does imply that giving birth is always best. Aside from the fact that this is wrong - there are times when the fetus isn't viable or when giving birth will harm or kill the mother - this isn't an open attitude. Someone who watched and believed the ad is more likely to feel shame if they needed an abortion than if they hadn't seen the ad or had seen a more balanced perspective.

At the same time that this was going on, CBS also refused to air the ad for ManCrunch, a gay dating site - apparently because "gay" violates their standards. The ad featured over-the-top implied kissing. If sexuality was the problem in the ad, CBS could have asked that the ad be re-worked. Instead, they rejected it outright.

And the Friends of the Family leader is strongly anti-gay? Whose pocket are you in, CBS? Who owns you?

You're showing your right-wing colours, CBS. Shame on you.

Big steps

Ian and I took a big step today - we set up a joint bank account for our household expenses.

This is a huge change for us because up until now we've always kept our money separate; each of us pays a bunch of household bills from our own accounts. But since we're going to be buying a house together, we decided that it would be best if all the household bills came out of just one account. It'll be easier to keep track of what we're actually spending as well.

Of course we're each keeping our own separate accounts with our own separate investments and stuff. I've opened up accounts at Ian's bank to make transferring money into the joint account easier. And to get away from my current bank, which has annoyed me very much. I'd actually left this bank ages ago because they annoyed me then, but they bought out the bank I'd taken my accounts to. I'm feeling no small amount of satisfaction in leaving my bank again :)

Over the next week I'll go ahead and change all of my deposits and withdrawls. The bank could do it for me but I'd have to get all my account information together anyways, so I'll just do it myself.

It feels weird to be doing this, in a way, because it's like we're mixing a part of our money together. We're common-law anyways but having some of our money together makes the infrastructure of the relationship feel that much stronger, as though there's more binding us together, if that makes sense. It's sort of scary to me because I've never been this committed to someone before. It's going to take a while for me to get used to this, I think.

Movie night

We went to a friend's place to watch Surrogates tonight. It was ok but not as good as I'd hoped it would be.

Surrogates is a concept movie: people live through a robot, or surrogate, that's hooked up to their brains. So the people lie in a chair connected to this surrogate that goes out and lives their lives for them. It's an extension of game avatars, really, except that people represent themselves via these robots instead of avatars on a screen.

Of course all is not well in surrogate-land; not everyone wants to live through a surrogate because they feel that they aren't really living that way. Plus someone has gone out and made a weapon that kills not only the surrogate but the person behind it. The rest of the movie deals mostly with who made that technology, what they're going to do with it, and how to stop them.

On paper, this sounds like an interesting movie, doesn't it? Sadly, it's not nearly as interesting as I thought it would be. This is partly because some things don't make all that much sense. For example, all of the surrogates look pretty normal, even at a club that people go to. Why are there no people with horns or tails or other crazy looks? Why are people driving cars from today, fourteen years from now? Why are people driving cars at all?

Setting aside those aspects, the characters in the story are one-dimensional; they lack depth and their motives are quite transparent. This isn't just a problem with the characters, actually. The whole story is lacking depth and interest. It's as though the producers didn't flesh out the story enough, as though they thought about the first consequences of living through surrogates but they didn't push the story further to make it interesting.

This isn't a movie worth going out of your way to see, but if it happens to be on tv or something it wouldn't be a complete waste of watching time.

Book club experiences

I think I mentioned before that my Meditation group is now studying The Power of Now.

I was reading the book this week when it went skidding across the floor. I threw the book because I was annoyed by some of the text that didn't make sense and that seemed a bit arrogant.

I think I can get through this book but I'm approaching the rest of it with some trepidation. If I weren't in this book club, I'm pretty sure that I'd just stop reading this book. The concept of living in the moment isn't new - it's really just another name for mindfulness or flow. The difference is that this book describes some possible benefits from living in the moment

I brought all this up in the book club today because I figure I can't be the only person who gets annoyed with the book or who feels this way. We talked about it and at one point I said that when I was reading something or trying to learn something, I need it to be logically consistent. One person said, "but this book isn't about logic."

Ummm. Yeah.

Something can be logically consistent without having a stitch of logic in it, which I guess is something that is not clear to everyone.

I'm committed to working through this book... for now. I can't promise that it won't annoy me, though, or that I won't be annoyed by the people in the study group. There's still a possibility that I'll get something out of the concepts in the book, and that's what I'm trying to keep in mind.

Mystery solved!

So this mystery package turned out to be a version of Monopoly to celebrate my company's 25th anniversary. Yep, they Fedex'ed hundreds (thousands?) of these board games to their employees.

I admit that I was hoping for a better present than this - like, say, fabric or vintage patterns from a mystery donor :) Ian's thinking of taking it in to work and letting them play with (laugh at) it.

In other news, I got a message from Blogger telling me that they will no longer be supporting publishing via FTP as of March 26, 2010. That's what I currently do to publish this blog so I guess I'll have to migrate it somewhere else. Blogger says that they'll be providing tools to do the migration and take care of redirecting links and whatnot. Hopefully I won't lose all 1149 posts; I think the worst-case scenario is that I'll end up having to start fresh and link to this one for the history.

Fashion reality TV

I'm so excited - Project Runway 7 is starting up in Canada this coming weekend!!! The last season was such a huge disappointment but I'm hearing that this latest season is going to be much better.

They're back in New York this season, which means that their regular judges will be there all the time instead of appearing sporadically in LA. I know that Lifetime wanted to change Project Runway once they got the franchise from Bravo, but moving it to LA was the wrong change. Hopefully the show will stay in NYC from now on.

You might be happy to read that even if Project Runway turns out to be a dud from now on, there's a replacement in the wings. After losing Project Runway, Bravo went ahead and created a new show called Launch My Line that's been airing in the US and started airing in Canada on TVTropolis about a month ago.

Like Project Runway, Launch My Line is a fashion competittion reality series. Each contestant (called a "designer") is successful in a non-fashion field and wants to be a fashion designer. Each one is paired with an actual fashion designer (called an "expert") who will help them construct their clothes and give them advice or whatever.

One key feature about Launch My Line is that each contestant is actually making a runway collection one garment at a time. So each week they're adding a piece to their collection that not only is a part of their vision, but that also meets that week's challenge. As we get further along, each contestant's garments are considered both as part of the challenge and as part of their collection.

Since they're creating for a whole collection, the designers had to buy half of their fabric at the beginning of the series. They also have a different model every week, which makes sense because when you show a collection, you have different models show the clothes. It would be a really long show otherwise, yes? :)

Of course there's drama what with the wacky contestants (like the one who is really designing for herself) and the wacky experts (like the camera hogging drama queen), and the relationship between the two. Oh, and Dean and Dan from DSquared2 are the hosts. They're such cuties.

So if you're a Project Runway fan, I hope you're watching the show (or will be, when it starts this week). And if you do love fashion and competition, check out Launch My Line. It's well worth the hour each week. :)