Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Netflix Instant

Netflix Instant has really been improving, in my opinion. For a while, there wasn't very much that I wanted to watch. But recently I've noticed that the library has really expanded. Now available - all prior seasons of Buffy, Angel, 24, X-Files, Lost, The Office and 30 Rock. My requests, please release Alias and West Wing! Battlestar would be another great release.

The streaming quality is really good over my PS3 - the HD shows look incredible. That's what drew me into Lost in the first place.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Insurance

The government's lawsuit against Goldman Sachs has had me thinking about insurance. After all, Goldman's John Paulson was "betting against" bad mortgages, and one means of doing that is taking out insurance against these bad mortgages.

Doesn't this mean insurance is essentially gambling? Let's look at insurance against bad mortgages. The bank offers a mortgage to someone unlikely to pay (a "bad" mortgage). Then an investor (perhaps the bank itself) takes insurance against the mortgage - if the mortgage fails, the investor gets paid. If the mortgage works out, the bank gets paid. So then, we'll sell the obligation of the mortgage to someone else (or chop it into tiny pieces and bury shares of the obligation into funds all over the place with better investments) and also let other people become beneficiaries of the insurance. So the bank makes the money from unloading the mortgage and the insurance policy.

The thing is, there are theoretically opportunities to take out insurance on anything. Now bankers want to project futures markets on not just stocks but how individual films perform, for example.

Hmm. Does this mean I can offer "Detroit Lions insurance" to NFL fans? They can pay me a fee and every time the team loses, they'll get some small return on the loss. But if the team does better than expected they don't get anything (except the satisfaction of the team doing well). Since some people will think the team will do poorly, they'll buy into my insurance program. But others will think the team will do poorly, so I can sell them the insurance obligations. This is just gambling right? I think the team will do poorly so I put money into insurance. Or I think the team will do well so I'll buy out the insurance policies since I'm sure I won't have to pay anything out.

Of course, then we could package teams from different leagues together to decrease the risk. So you could buy a fund mixed of Lions / Nationals / Knicks insurance! I think we can make derivatives out of this too.

Who needs gambling when you have insurance?

Observations

Inglourious Basterds - A pretty good Tarantino film without being too complicated or mysterious but still with his style of dark humor. I don't know why it took Netflix 4 months to get it to me, but it was great.

24 - Considering how hard it is to fire someone from the government, people get fired from CTU a lot!

Hubble 3D - Where is this movie playing??

The Jets - shopping Alan Faneca now? Mike Tannenbaum is the type of GM who gets a lot done but this seems ridiculous. We're trying to win next year, right?

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Taylor

Even if Jason Taylor helps lead the Jets to a Super Bowl, he'll still always seem like a selfish pretty boy who puts himself before his team to me. He'll really have to have an amazing season - at least 10 sacks in meaningful spots - for me to think that he's actually worth this signing.

The NY Times had a headline, "Taylor Ready to Let Bygones be Bygones with Jets Fans." Oh how gracious of him. He had better be good. Sure, Johnny Damon and Roger Clemens came to the Yankees after success with the Red Sox - but neither of them made ridiculous statements about Jets fans. Taylor says that saying those things just was to help add heat to the rivalry. No, that's not necessary to add passion to the rivalry - to insult the fans. Frankly, I don't remember Taylor ever coming up big for the Dolphins when it mattered, and so that concerns me just as much as the fact that he skipped out on Dolphins' mini camp in order to be on "Dancing with the Stars."

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Thursday, April 15, 2010

24: Season 8

Well, I finally caved and started watching 24: Season 8. Apparently this is the final season for this show. That's probably a good thing. I'll start off with the spoiler-free review. Granted, I'm only through about 13 episodes of the season so far (roughly 16 have aired) but I'm not sure I can continue.

The cast sounds like it would be pretty good. Kiefer Sutherland returns as Jack Bauer, Mary Lynn Rajskub is back for another go-around as Chloe O'Brian and Cherry Jones returns as President Allison Taylor. New stars added to the CTU team this year include Battlestar's Katee Sackhoff, Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Mykelti Williamson. Not a bad lineup. Anil Kapoor from Slumdog Millionaire is also present as a foreign leader. Plus, the show takes place in Manhattan for the first time. You'd think all these things would make for a pretty decent set-up.

Instead, what we get is a total retread of every other 24 season ever performed. If I had the inclination, I'd like to tally up the following scenarios that are now 24 cliches because they've been used so often. I won't even include the usual "hunt for the macguffin" type or "what is character x's allegiance" stuff that goes on. At least this year is fairly free of Presidential drama (although I've heard a certain character from prior years is returning, much to my chagrin).

So with some minor spoilers, this year we've been treated to Jack being forced out of retirement, a scenario where a CTU staff member has serious personal problems that are completely uninteresting yet seem to take up 15 minutes of some episodes, CTU being "taken out," a mole within CTU (that is _so_ unbelievable I may not be able to continue watching), inter-department squabbling between federal law enforcement agencies, and oh yes, nobody trusts Chloe despite her years of experience. I'm waiting for Jack's daughter to get kidnapped but I think she's safely on a cross country plane flight.

I'm glad this show is ending because it was spectacular for about 4 seasons, then horrible for about 2, then so-so for 1 and now back to horrible. If they can't come up with any new elements, it is definitely time to put this to bed.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

World Series Rings

Matsui gets a World Series ring and I swear watching replays of his ovation gave me goosebumps! I need to get my priorities straight.

Twitter

I follow my workplace's PR dept on Twitter to see what kinds of things they announce. But they just requested to follow my feed. Um, no, you can't follow my feed!! If you do I won't be able to semi-publicly air out frustrations with work!

Friday, April 09, 2010

Netflix Rental Agreement

Netflix signed a deal today delaying new movie releases from FOX and Universal to its customers by 28 days. On the face of it, this would seem like a bad deal. But actually, it's probably a shrewd move by Netflix.

The movie studios are scared that rental services are taking away their sales of DVD's and Blu-Rays, so they want to delay the rental releases a few weeks in hopes more people will buy again. Typical "old media" thinking. With all the digital distribution coming along with iPads, iPhones, and mobile devices, it's only a matter of time before disc based distribution is obsolete and yet here the major companies are, (WB made a similar agreement last month), more concerned about disc sales than figuring out the reason people don't buy discs anymore. Besides the poor economic times, people are hesitant to invest in more disc based media because there are so many streaming options and so many formats available. Nobody wants to re-buy their media multiple times. Thus, sales are lagging.

I think Netflix realizes this and is willing to take the delays on rental privileges because in exchange they were able to get something even more valuable - access to more streaming content for their user base. Down the line, this is going to be more valuable as mobile devices are even more ubiquitous and they try to push their new iPad and soon to come iPhone app. Good move.

Fox News Hurts My Head

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Big Bang Treaty
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea Party

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Don't Get Taylor

Apparently Jason Taylor is visiting the Jets today. I'd really rather not have him. I believe he made some not so nice comments in the past.

Monday, April 05, 2010

Butler

I'm secretly rooting for Butler to win so that sports pages everywhere can have the headline "The Butler Did It." Unless someone can come up with an equally entertaining and silly Duke headline, I'll continue to root for the underdog.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Sweet Caroline

Great move by the Red Sox to bring in Neil Diamond for "Sweet Caroline" except he sounds pretty horrible. I hope the Yankees try to one-up the Sox by bringing in the band who sang the "Cotton Eye Joe" dance song.

Baseball starting

Woo hoo, it's the 2010 baseball season! Pretty exciting start with the Yankees / Red Sox.

The Good: Bill Simmons wrote his best column since 2001 that does a great job of recapping some sabermetric stuff that's pretty interesting.

The Bad: No Yankees / Red Sox games between May and August.

The Ugly: Curt Schilling has a regular TV job.

Comic Update - April 2010

Along with an update of TV / movies / video games I've been playing, here's a brief comic update.

I've been re-reading Final Crisis, a controversial DC mini-series. Besides the fact that it's somewhat impenetrable because it's complicated, one of the other big problems with the book is it's almost impossible to know what order to read the issues in. Yes, there's a series Final Crisis 1-7 but there's also 2 critical issues, "Superman Beyond 1-2." Batman issues 682-683 detail the events for Batman between Final Crisis #2, and his reappearance in Final Crisis #7. Other crossovers seem to fit but not quite exactly. There are about 12 main issues to this series and DC would have done themselves a favor to just call them Final Crisis 1-12 and leave it that way. It's a jumble.

Blackest Night, the current DC mega-crossover finished this past week and I'm waiting for my DCBS order to come in this week. I'm eagerly awaiting the end of this series. Overall, this has been a great story, although in some ways the scope is more limited than I had originally expected. Ivan Reis is an amazing artist. The only disappointment here is that there are critical issues to the story that run in Green Lantern, and again, it's not intuitive when they occur in relation to the Blackest Night issues. Sometimes the Green Lantern issue occurs before the Blackest Night issue of the same month. Other times, it's afterwards.

Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin is great fun. This is "good" Grant Morrison (vs "bad" that wrote Final Crisis). I didn't think I'd like Dick Grayson as Batman. Now I'm disappointed Bruce Wayne is coming back.

Geoff Johns usually does no wrong in my mind, but The Flash: Rebirth was a little bit of a misfire for me. Ethan Van Sciver is also usually a great artist but I felt some of his issues towards the end left me a little disappointed. I re-read the issues all together, and the whole piece just didn't flow well for me.

I also re-read Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday recently. This is a superb comic. It's too bad there were so many delays along its publication. In re-reading it, I felt that there was not only a great sci-fi element and genre parody, but there is also a really sentimental story buried in there as well. Excellent.

The X-Men universe is supposed to have a "major shakeup" with its storyline coming up called Second Coming. Not sure if this will "change everything," but it probably won't. The Messiah War crossover between X-Force and Cable was fairly entertaining but ultimately didn't do anything. Hopefully this next crossover will be a little better. Fraction is finding his pacing on Uncanny X-Men and Greg Land's photo-realistic style hasn't been bothering me as much as usual.

Over my last vacation, I re-read Y: The Last Man. This was an excellent 60 issue run, start to finish. There's really no complaints here. This book would make for a great introductory story for anyone new to comics. It also shows comics are more than super-heroes. Originally I read the final volume so far after reading some of the original elements, but after reading everything together, it's just amazing. An all-time great story.

At a sale a while ago, I picked up the first two trade paperbacks of Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Jansen. Classic stuff with DD, Bullseye, Elektra and the Kingpin. You see Miller's style evolve and the stories still hold up well today. I'm excited to pick up volume 3.

If you like standalone stories, Wolverine: Old Man Logan is an excellent one. Mark Millar's style gets old sometimes, but Steve McNiven's artwork is beautiful. It's a great Wolverine tragedy in a dystopian future. My only complaint would be that the last issue is a little gory. McNiven's work is terrific.

Finally, Captain America has been Reborn and the monthly series has resumed. Overall, I'm expecting a little more from this book. It's steady but not as exciting as it used to be. Maybe we've just been spoiled.

Media Update

A quick review on some of the media I've been consuming:

TV
Lost: The final season, and it's been pretty excellent. It does seem like they're stalling a little bit as they head towards the end. On the other hand a few of the episodes have dumped a ton of answers. My only complaint is they've split up the characters in such a way that you go full episodes without seeing certain characters. I wish that wasn't happening.

V: I don't find this show as intriguing as Lost, and somehow its theme of "anyone could be a V" makes me think of Battlestar Galactica (which was much better). I'll keep watching for a little bit but I'm not sure how much longer I'll stay on board.

The Office: I thought it had jumped the shark with the wedding episode but there have been a few good episodes since then. Maybe it'll be making a turnaround.

Law and Order / Law and Order SVU: The NY Times wrote about this recently. Law and Order has been getting better, and meanwhile SVU is getting worse. SVU is so contrived lately, but meanwhile the cases on the regular Law and Order are about as good as they've been.

Batman: Brave and the Bold - check it out! It's not just for kids. It's funny.

Smallville: I can't believe they want to bring this show back for another season. Yet I can't stay away.

24: I haven't seen this season yet but it's the last season according to reports. It takes place in NY, so I'll be watching.

Video Games
Last year, when I bought my PS3, I had 1-2 games I was interested. Now my library of games is 16. In that time, there were a lot of Christmas sales, but also a lot of good games. Amazingly, the best 2-3 have been very recent.

God of War 3: I just finished this game. It's better than the first two (which I also replayed recently in the HD versions). The bosses are tougher, the scale is more epic, and the story, well, it's not as straightforward but it's not anywhere near a Metal Gear Solid level of complexity.

Uncharted 2: Another amazing game. I think this, God of War 3 and MGS 4 are probably 3 of my favorite games ever. Great graphics, great gameplay and a movie level of story. While GOW 3 is more on the side of action and MGS 4 is more on the side of cinematic story, Uncharted 2 is nicely inbetween.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: This is one of the best comic adaptation games I've ever played. I had played this before Uncharted 2 and GOW 3, and thought it was great. Now that I've finished those two other games, I'd have to revise my review. Arkham Asylum is certainly fun and engaging, and makes great use of the Batman license. But it is nowhere near Uncharted 2 or GOW 3 in terms of fun, gameplay or graphics.

I haven't seen a ton of movies lately in the theater. Avatar was totally overrated, I'm glad it didn't win that many academy awards. If we gave Oscars based on groundbreaking effects, then Independence Day and Jurassic Park should have won more Oscars. On Netflix - Justice League: Crisis on 2 Earths was good, Hangover was overrated, Public Enemies was a bit boring, Funny People and I Love You, Man were better than I expected, Bruno was not as good as Borat.

ABC

With Lost winding down, it seems like ABC is really pushing shows like V and Flashforward as the heirs to Lost. But I'm not sure it's working. I think part of their thinking is that there are cast members that overlap between Lost and the other two shows. Also, the serial nature of the shows and the sci-fi themes are also similarities. But that's probably where the similarities end. As a show, Lost is pretty unique and I'm not sure that either of the other two can really capture that uniqueness. I have been watching V, but it is not nearly as interesting as Lost was in the early episodes. In fact, right now the main reason I have been watching it is that I didn't realize Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet from Lost) was a major character in V. I'm really surprised how her hairstyle and makeup changes fooled me.