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I won't review Tales as if it were a stand-alone work. That would be unfair, since it's the B-story inside a larger work. Instead, I'll deal with its merits as an adjunct to the Watchmen film.

First off, the details. I got Freighter on Blu-Ray which was probably overkill. The animation quality isn't really that impressive, and DVD might have been the better choice in order to let its slightly retro look blend a bit more rather than having every pencil line (yep, hand drawn by Korean animators) pop out of my screen. It's animated in a very Heavy Metal style, though it's much smoother and obviously computer-colored. I think it's a good look, and certainly a less realistic style was the right choice to pair with Watchmen's over-sharpened reality.

More below...

Joss Whedon, Ron Moore. These are giants of the TV F&SF genres. They've created such giants as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Deep Space Nine, Firefly and so on. They also have a tell.

In poker, a tell is some sort of signal that you give unconsciously that can indicate how you feel about your cards. In terms of genre TV, it's a simpler thing. When you watch season 6 and 7 of Buffy or season 4 of Battlestar Galactica and you start to see the main characters suffering, crying, going berserk, acting self-destructively, having tantrums and breakdowns... that's would appear to be a tell. It's a sign that your creative forces have moved on to a new project. Perhaps not entirely, but the show you are watching is no longer their primary focus.

Joss Whedon was moving on from Buffy to Firefly when seasons 6 and 7 started to suffer and Buffy spent most of her time boinking Spike or gloomily declaring that she was no longer fit to lead. Ron Moore was working on the Battlestar Galactica prequel series, Caprica,  when season 4 of BSG started to really lay into Adama. He cried more in half a season than he did in the entirety of the rest of the series, ended up on the floor/ground with some kind of liquid all over him (alcohol, Cylon repair goo, vomit) three times and generally had a series of Really Bad Days. So the next time you see a fantasy or science fiction show (even if it's on the SyFylis network) start to abuse its main characters, you'll know there's something new coming...

Sadly, I have to get rid of some of my books. If you're just reading my blog, you can skip this article. This is just here for friends I'm offering books to.

I've thought more about SyFy (the new name for the SciFi channel), and I think the obligation falls to the science fiction fans to show the skiffy channel the error of their ways. Syence Fyction conventions should spring up across the land, promoting all of the least socially accepted traits of fandom: costuming, anthro, Japanese tentacle porn, slash, etc. These events should never refer to themselves as SyFy (after all, that's a trademarked term, I'm sure). No, they should just make it clear what segement of fandom is embracing this change in terminology. They should make it public, loud, and loving! I for one will pledge to avoid bathing for the events and cite Cherry 2000 and Galaxina as genre-defining works as often as I can get a reporter to listen.

Perhaps... and I say this with great cynicism, tempered with a just a bit of hope; perhaps then we can get someone in charge at the channel to realize that you change the audience perception by changing the quality of the content, not by changing the name and ordering more Ghost Hunters.

According to numerous sources including a New York Times article and the original press release, the SciFi channel will be re-branding itself the SyFy channel. This is what they have to say for themselves:

"By changing the name to Syfy, which remains phonetically identical, the new brand broadens perceptions and embraces a wider range of current and future imagination-based entertainment beyond just the traditional sci-fi genre, including fantasy, supernatural, paranormal, reality, mystery, action and adventure."

First off, they're dead-wrong on the pronunciation. Try as they may to direct people to continue to pronounce that so that it rhymes with eye, the obvious thing to do is to start calling it "sifee," which many, many posters to the scifi-wire press release immediately pointed out sounded like a shortened version of "syphilis."

But that's not the worst of it, and sadly a name change is only a symptom of the greater problem, here.

You hear a lot about the advent of "microblogging" today, but in my opinion the best compromise between the point-to-point burst of IM and the prose-heavy burden of broadcast blogging is Google Reader. At first, it looks like an RSS reader, but it's really a whole lot more (in about the same way that Twitter is a whole lot more than Web-bound SMS). For example, if you look at my shared items on Google Reader, you'll see that I've got comments on most of the items I've shared. Some of the things I share are from my own sites, but most are from the Web in general. News, photographs. Whatever I'm reading tends to get shared, and the stream-of-consciousness ranges from political commentary to gaping at gadgets to thinking out loud about photography.

This is what I'd really like to use Twitter for, but it can be too cumbersome at times to compress my thoughts plus a link into 140 characters. Sometimes there's just too much context for that.

On the Jimmy Fallon Show tonight, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht asked all of the viewers to follow Bryan Brinkman, a random audience member who used Twitter, but was fairly new to it. He's gotten over 15,000 followers since the show was taped, and it's still climbing rapidly.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure what it says about social networking. Perhaps it underscores the power of a late night TV show to engage its audience with a product more than anything. It's been done before. Stephen Colbert got his viewers to vandalize Wikipedia and vote for his name being put on a bridge and a space station module, so why not keep it going? Get people to go out and buy the sponsor's product online.

Perhaps this is the future of TV advertising as DVRs render commercials moot.

The New Yorker has an interesting review of "Watchmen" up on their site. After reading Roger Ebert's review earlier, I was certainly interested to see how someone would pan "Watchmen." Ebert was quite positive on it, but I know that the film won't appeal to everyone, so when I heard the New Yorker had panned it, I thought we'd get a good contrast with the Ebert review. Sadly, nothing could be farther for the truth. The New Yorker (or more specifically, Anthony Lane) apparently finds more interest in calling a movie (and its fans) names than in finding true flaws to criticize. After all, the latter would require treating the subject matter with respect, and when you walk in with a set of assumptions about how bad something will be, respect isn't the first item on the menu.

Where Ebert saw, "another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie," it seems that what Lane watched was, "a project from which all tenderness has been excised, and which prefers to paint mankind as a bevy of brutes." To be fair to Lane, he's hit the nail on the head. To be less generous, however, I don't think he understands what he's just said or the value proposition which "Watchmen" offers. It's not a tender film (or book), and while it doesn't exactly paint humanity as brutes, what it has to say isn't very kind. Dr. Manhattan compares the human race to termites in a throw-away line at the end of the story. In "Watchmen," we are meant to observe the human race in much the same way that an entomologist would. We see mankind strive for certain ideals (love, peace, justice) and ultimately express their flaws and baser natures. Even love-making is tragically flawed in "Watchmen," being expressed as rape, clumsy fumbling that ends prematurely, or a passionate embrace that results in a dangerous and literally inflammatory accident.

OK, I got off topic there, and started doing my own review. Back to Lane and Ebert...

I walked into Watchmen expecting it to be adequate, but mostly a let-down. The original changed the way I related to the superhero genre and informed my interpretation of everything that came after. I'm not going to say that the movie didn't make me cringe once or twice. There were some minor changes that I thought were unfortunate, but by way of comparison to just about any superhero genre film in the past 20 years, I was floored by the level of fidelity.

Fidelity to the original, however, does not always make for a good film. So, did it work on the big screen? Good gods, yes! I think that there's a class of people who will walk out of Watchmen with a profound frustration, but the majority of viewers are going to be in for a treat, and one that won't let them off the hook easily. There are going to be quite a few parking-lot conversations about the nature of justice and how a woman can forgive her attacker.

I'll dodge into spoiler territory after the break...

SPOILERS BELOW

I've read the reviews from the die-hard fans of the Watchmen comic (of which, I suppose I'm one). I'm not an innocent. I understand that a Hollywood movie based on great source material has about an 80% chance of sucking. So why won't Watchmen suck? Because of several things: 1) the reviews uniformly indicate that Snyder got most of it dead-on 2) Alan Moore's genius was not in the final two issues of Watchmen, but in the entire story 3) while fans will recoil at the changes in the ending, the vast majority of viewers will not have read the book, and will see this as a new work, whole and complete.