Techie question...

We have cable TV, which is ace and brill and all that except when it goes wrong, which is often. My question is this. When I am watching a cable channel, is the image supposed to be semi-pixelated into roughly three-quarter-inch squares? (I say semi, because there is detail inside the squares, but it's very noticeable, especially during fast camera moves in dark bits, that the screen has these gridlines, and I'm sure they shouldn't be there...

(no subject)

Many happy thingies to vaurien and the_magician!

(no subject)

I didn’t watch a lot of the last season of The West Wing at all.

This was sad, given that I still think it was the best thing on telly outside sf/fantasy, and better than many things in those genres. Part of it is that I’ve been spending too much time on the computer rather than downstairs watching telly, but there were two other reasons why I didn’t make the time.

The proximate cause is Aaron Sorkin’s leaving. The man could write. It didn’t take me five minutes into the new season to notice that the music had gone. Not the music music, but the music in the words, the tight, intricate, brilliant weaving of phrases and rhetorical flourishes that made the show “Must-Hear TV” as someone called it. The dialogue was still intelligent, witty and well-done, but so is the dialogue in dozens of other shows. Sorkin’s style was unique, and I missed it.

The primary cause goes deeper, and has been growing on me for some time now. WW is a show about a fictional American president, a Democrat, an idealist, and a man with the wisdom to know what needs doing and the will to do it. Early on, in an episode called “Let Bartlet be Bartlet,” he and his staff both upbraided each other for holding the other back, not doing the necessary good for reasons of political expediency. It was then that I began to realise this was going to be a story about failure. It has to be. The country is now under a man who is so far from Jed Bartlet that they might be separate species. If the writers gave the characters free rein, if they really honestly “let Bartlet be Bartlet,” the reality of the show would immediately begin to diverge from current reality, more and more every week, till it became as fantastic as “Earth: Final Conflict.” The writers can’t let that happen. Not only would it increase their workload a thousandfold, having to maintain and describe an alternate Earth in the detail necessary to tell the stories, but unfavourable comparisons between reality and the fictional world might invite the wrath of the Powers That Be.

So Bartlet has to fall short, each and every time, and the dreams have to remain just dreams, and his America has to stay just as messed-up as the real one. And knowing that kills the show for me. I can’t watch those wonderful, flawed, funny, brave people fail again and again.

Sorry, guys. It was truly a blast.