"Tonight, the part of Vancouver will be played by ..."

A new science fiction series called Continuum has just started up on Showcase.  The plot deals with political terrorists who manage to escape execution in 2077 by time-jumping to 2012.  One of the cops doing security at the execution is accidentally pulled back in time with the terrorists, and she undertakes the task of tracking down and neutralizing them before they remold the future by changing the past.

After watching the first episode, my initial reaction was neither here nor there. I'm pretty much up to speed on time travel plot options, and they haven't broken new ground as far as I'm concerned, but the writers do display a clear understanding of how the game is played.  The effects were acceptable but not brilliant, and as with any new science fiction program they've followed the tradition of loading the call sheet with actors from defunct SF shows:  William B. Davis, the Smoking Man from X-Files; Lexa Doig, who played Rommie on Andromeda; Victor Webster from Mutant X; and Tony Amendola - Bra'tac from Stargate SG-1.

However, I do have to give them credit for doing something unique.  Continuum is filmed in Vancouver, as so many other movies and TV shows have been - but it also takes place in Vancouver!  Yes, someone is finally producing a science fiction series in which Vancouver doesn't pretend to be Seattle, or New York, or Metropolis, or any one of a dozen other cities.  It was actually sort of fun to see the heroine wondering where she is, and having the computer wizard who is monitoring her implant cheerfully announce, "Corner of Pender and Beatty!"

- Sid

Probably not much like Hoegaarden.

There's a marvellous little microbrewery called Steamworks located in downtown Vancouver.  They brew a good selection of beers including a nice lager, they're in a great location, the food is tasty, and if you sit near the windows on the north side it's a good view provided that you like train tracks. 

A couple of months ago on the way to work, I noticed that a maintenance problem with one of the letters in their neon signage had changed the entire direction of their branding, but when I ran up at lunch to take a picture for the blog, they seemed to have resolved the issue.  It popped up now and then over the next couple of weeks, but I could never reconcile its appearance with the schedule for my morning commute, availability of camera equipment, and lack of pouring down rain, and finally it seemed to go away completely.

When my department had lunch at Steamworks on Friday, I was reminded of the signage thing, and mentioned it to my manager Donovan, because as a longtime player of World of Warcraft, I thought he'd appreciate it.  He found it amusing enough that I decided to fire up Photoshop and redo the Steamworks signage to replicate the problem:

The "orcs with a k" spelling is really more of a Warhammer 40K thing than Warcraft, but I still think that Steam Orks would be a great name for a brewery, and let's face it, it's unlikely that orcs would be overly concerned with the finer points of spelling.  I can just imagine being seated by a surly green-skinned monstrosity with tusks and pointed ears, and then watching frantic goblins equipped with a variety of steampunk tools and accessories struggling with a wheezing, bubbling fermentation tank in order to produce a pint of Saruman's White. (And I bet that hardly anyone would ever be brave enough - or drunk enough - to chat up the waitresses.*)

Seriously, I think that the idea of a Tolkien-themed brewery is a marketable concept, and why not call it Steam Orks?  I think that it has a nice, um, ring to it.

- Sid

* I was hoping to put up a picture for this, but trust me, you do NOT want to see some of the things that come up if you do a Google™ image search for "sexy orc".

Attack of the Monoboob.

I come from the Net, through systems, peoples and cities, to this place: Mainframe. My format: Guardian - to mend and defend. To defend my new-found friends, their hopes and dreams - to defend them from their enemies.

They say the User lives outside the Net, and inputs games for pleasure.  No one knows for sure, but I intend to find out! 

REBOOT!

It would appear that summer has arrived on the West Coast, and as such, sunshine has once again become a familiar sight. As a result, I'm starting to walk downtown on Saturdays for lunch and some shopping.

Sadly, HMV has closed the doors on its flagship store on Burrard Street, so I've been forced to switch my DVD and Blu-ray shopping over to FutureShop on Granville.  This week I was pleased to see the collected Reboot! on the shelf for a mere fifteen dollars per two-season set, and without hesitation picked up the entire run.

Created by Vancouver's Mainframe Studios, ReBoot's 1994 debut on ABC made it the first fully digital commercial cartoon, preceding Toy Story by a full year.  (And, I might add, with six and a half hours of material rather than Toy Story's 81 minutes.)  For readers unfamiliar with the series, Reboot was built around the concept of computers as urban centers, virtual cities if you will, inhabited by binomes - the various bits and bytes that made up the operating system. The hero of the show was Bob, a Guardian tasked with defending a system called Mainframe from the various perils of game downloads (which, when won by the User, caused massive damage to the system) and viruses such as the evil Megabyte and his sorcerous sister, Hexadecimal.

Intended as children's programming, it was also loaded with geek references and computer jokes, ranging from the obvious, such as Megabyte, Hexadecimal, and Bob's love interest Dot Matrix, to the more obscure - did everyone realize that Enzo the boyish sprite was named after the initials of microprocessor flag bits? (Enable interrupt, Negative, Zero and Overflow.) Or Phong, the Command.com/mayor of Mainframe, who was named after a shading algorithm used in rendering 3-D files.*

The producers of ReBoot were surprised to find themselves in almost constant conflict with ABC, who demanded that Dot's bosom be less anatomically correct (ergo the infamous monoboob of the title), refused to let her kiss her brother on his birthday due to the sexual connotations (no, honestly), and, adding insult to injury, told the Canadian company that they had to remove a reference to hockey.

The end of the second season saw a parting of the ways with ABC, and a move to syndication. (And, as you'd expect, a more realistic bosom for Dot.)  It also saw improved animation and rendering, and an extended, more mature story arc dealing with Enzo's search through the Web for Bob, who was banished from Mainframe by Megabyte at the end of Season Two.  Season Three saw the end of the series as such, but there were two follow-up feature-length films that were broadcast in North America as a truncated fourth season.

It's great to watch the show again, and very gratifying to once again see the astonishing amount of creativity and attention to detail that made it so enjoyable for adults as well as children.  Ironically, the DVD episodes don't appear to be digitally rendered files, or if they are, they weren't rendered at DVD resolution.  My guess would be that they were either upsampled from lower resolution files, or perhaps transferred from some sort of digital video format.  

I wonder if the original pre-render files are still in existence?  Funny to think of them slowly eroding away bit by literal bit in some abandoned hard drive array or on backup tapes in a closet somewhere - in fact, that's actually very close to the final fate of Mainframe.  Sadly, if that has happened, it won't be possible to save those files as easily as Mainframe was saved in the series.

And how was Mainframe saved?  How else - by a reboot.

- Sid

*I've heard various theories regarding the provenance of Bob's rather prosaic name.  Wikipedia says that it's "likely" a reference to Amiga computer Blitter OBjects, but I've always fondly hoped that it came from Marathon, Bungie's 1994 Macintosh breakthough game.  There were cannon fodder characters in Marathon called BOB - Born On Board.  I guess it depends on whether the Mainframe team were Amiga fans or Apple believers.