Did anyone watch Dollhouse tonight? As an assortment of places reported awhile back, Fox is burning through the remaining season two episodes in 2-hour blocks this month, with the final three in January. As ever, Hulu is sure to have both of tonight’s excellent episodes within the next few days!

I don’t say excellent lightly here – I really enjoyed the end of season one and really liked how the Epitaph 1 episode on the season 1 DVDs wrapped things up while leaving ambiguity. I think it’s great how Joss (can I call him Joss? man I’m a dweeb) planned ahead with an episode that essentially said, “this is one of the possible horrendous outcomes of what’s going on in Dollhouse,” without closing any doors on season two.

I loved both episodes tonight, and the first thing I said to my roommate afterward was, “I’m so glad this show was canceled!” Surely, Whedon’s experience with Firefly – Fox airing episodes out of order like total jerkbags before canceling during the first season – prepared him for Dollhouse’s abrupt cancellation. It’s good to see a focused team of writers and producers providing great characters with a worthy plot-line. Nothing sharpens the mind like cancellation! Let me choose between seven top-notch episodes and 21 that are a mix of “cool!” “meh” and “boo,” and I’ll take seven every time.

Enver Gjokaj was born for Dollhouse – I don’t think I’ve seen anyone better at adopting a different voice, attitude, and mannerisms. Ray Wise’s cameo tonight was good. Summer Glau was better than I expected in that her role wasn’t the same one I’ve always seen her in, and she played it very convincingly. If I have one complaint, it’s that Eliza Dushku is too sexy. It seems somehow… unsafe.

I’m looking forward to the final seven episodes, hopeful that tonight was an indicator of the fun twists and madness we can expect!

As the first season of Dollhouse came to a close and we became fully convinced of Tahmoh Penikett’s awesomeness, my roommate pointed out that Agent Ballard was also part of the Battlestar Galactica cast. Since I didn’t get Sci-Fi (er, “SyFy,” since somehow they haven’t realized that name sucks) when Battlestar Galactica premiered, I knew the series only as the go-to reference when you wanted to call someone a nerd. Given the plethora of nerdy things I already watched, there wasn’t a compelling reason for me to add it to the list.

Having now seen the first two seasons via Netflix, it is so good. Really, the best way to describe my enthusiasm for the first half of Battlestar Galactica is “Schrute-like.” After watching the pilot – basically a feature film unto itself – I expected the entertainment value to drop. It did not. Through the first season and nearly all of the second, the characters (even the sleazy ones) are convincing and their relationships are interesting. The action is great, the bits of over-the-top science fiction goofiness are few and far between, and the drama is… dramatic.

Then you get to the last 20 minutes of the season two finale. I’ve read mixed things about seasons three and four, and the way season two ended inspires no confidence. Let’s say you have a believable love triangle – involving several major characters – that’s picking up steam, sparks of romance between two other characters, and a huge shift in the roles of warring political leaders. Would you fade to black and begin the next scene with “One year later?” Me neither. It almost felt like the writers had gotten tired of the whole wandering through space routine, and wanted to move on to something lamer.

So, like a Schrute (or a lady), season two of Battlestar Galactica left me feeling as though I’d missed a whole lot of important events in the lives of the characters, left me much less excited for the Season 3 disc that arrived today, and made me glad I resisted buying the crazy-go-nuts series box set when DeepDiscount.com had it on sale.

[Update: Typo. First paragraph. Corrected.]

Our new theme is mostly done, so I went ahead and launched it. The goal is better use of screen real estate with fresh content – I was tired of the old theme’s standard fixed-width center column with stacks of archive/admin links on either side. Looking for something more sexy and less… texty.

There are a couple things missing (any kind of worthwhile content in the green social media box at the right, for one), but I’m happy with how this turned out. I used Colorschemedesigner.com to help pick bright, non-clashing colors for the extra content boxes. To save space and reduce the amount of repetitive text in the sidebar, I janked together some code to display a random post with a matching tag for each tagged post. That way if you’re reading a post on a certain topic, you can jump straight to another one instead of picking through the archives. As ever, the WordPress Codex made this less painful.

I’ll be adding links and stuff, but the whole point of the blue and red boxes to the right is that they’ll pull content based on what I share in Google Reader, favorite on YouTube, and listen to with Zune. What’s missing? Any suggestions for social media features?? Leave a comment – which you can now do with your Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID account! For the low price of all 10 of the old comments being eaten…

Yeah, maybe I’ll fix that next weekend!

Coffing has mentioned Dollhouse a couple of times before – once before the series started, and again when it started getting good. The late upswing continued through tonight’s season (and series?) finale. If you never gave the show a chance, put the season 1 DVD on your list! If you watched at the beginning of the season and got bored… refer to the second half of the preceding sentence.

At first it seemed like Fox was going to pull another Firefly on Joss. The first several episodes had some promising characters, but nothing all that intriguing going on. Then came the rumors that Alan Tudyk would be making an appearance. And about halfway through the season, the awesomeness ensued.

I’m not sure Joss Whedon and Alan Tudyk can work on something together without it being spectacular. Alan Tudyk is so good at what he does. Do you need someone hilarious? Done. Someone crazy? Sure. Someone hilarious AND crazy? Look no further:

We’re not bluffing! –I’m bluffing –But the rest of us mean business!

I hope Dollhouse gets the second season that Fox screwed Firefly out of. The crew at TV by the Numbers do not seem optimistic. If you’d like to lose some faith in humanity, and watching the evening news doesn’t cut it, take a look at this graph on James Hibbard’s site. Note how Dollhouse’s ratings drop in inverse proportion to the show’s level of face-rocking goodness.

That’s my review of tonight’s episode of Chuck.

To use several more words: Yvonne Strahovski. Yikes. Adam Baldwin sets a high bar of badassery, and then hurls himself right over it. The past several episodes the story has been interesting, the writing has leaned towards action while bringing well-timed laughs, and the stars continue to be great at what they do. If you’ve missed it – Hulu has not.

Then you get to the preview for the next episode (and season finale). Are we headed for a cliffhanger? It looks cliffhanger-ish, but let’s face it… most of the commercials feature some combination of Chuck with a gun to his head and Sarah in her underoos. Again I thought, “Have they renewed Chuck? Because it’s been great and they better not ruin it.”

I turned to The Internets. And wouldn’t you know it, the New York Times Arts Beat posted an interview with Josh Schwartz, one of Chuck’s creators, this morning. The gist of the interview is that renewal or cancellation have still not been announced, which understandably sucks for everyone involved in making the show. They asked Schwartz about the season two finale, and his response was as far from what I was hoping for as a response could be:

If, in two weeks, that is the last episode of the show to ever air, it will be one of the least satisfying finales of all time.

Times like these I’m glad I have no power or influence! Should Chuck end in a miserable cliffhanger? Or should the show get another 20-some episodes, more than half of which are likely to be tired rehashes of old episodes mixed with on-again-off-again nonsense?

For a year or so I’ve been using Microsoft’s Zune software – despite the fact that I don’t have a Zune – because of how cool the online community features are. It’s a memory hog, it does janky things with your library’s metadata, and not all of your plays are tracked as they’re supposed to be. I’ve always felt a little guilty, operating on the assumption that iTunes was far superior software.

I was wrong. iTunes sucks. Want to add some music to your library? Give iTunes a few months to move everything… and convert it to a proprietary format. Want to get art for the 90% of your CDs whose album art was not recognized? You’ll have to sign in to the iTunes store. Then you’ll have to go to the website to confirm your identity. Then you’ll have to log in on the website again. Then when you’ve updated your account info (which requires you to provide a credit card), you’ll have to log back in through iTunes.

Congratulations! For all your trouble, you’ve earned the right to sync your music to your iPod. If you want to copy said music onto a different machine… good luck. If you connect a different iPod it will be logged in to your iTunes account, and you may have to smash it with a rock to sign it out. Each time you connect an unregistered iPod, it will try to register itself to your account until you’ve told it not to four times. If you need to charge someone else’s iPod, you’ll have to sync it with your library — or all the iPod’s contents will be deleted. Really, Apple? It takes some seriously aggravating “features” to make me wish I were using a Microsoft program.

Another entry for the Government Should Manage Fewer Things file, with a story on Yahoo! Tech about the idiotic digital transition plan. The converter box subsidy is running out of money:

To subsidize the converter boxes, most of which cost between $40 and $80, the government has been letting consumers request up to two $40 coupons per home. But any day now, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the arm of the Commerce Department in charge of administering the coupon program, expects to hit a $1.34 billion funding ceiling set by Congress.

I sort of understand the FCC mandating the broadcast switch to all-digital. I can also see the argument for providing converter vouchers, since the government is essentially removing analog as an option for broadcast viewers with dated TVs. But two per household?

I’ve pissed and moaned about the stupidity of this from the first day I heard of it. Must be my poor grasp of the founding fathers’ intentions: Life, Liberty, and Federal Subsidies for Multiple-Television Families. This is such a small but pathetic example of bureaucracy run rampant. Someone in a meeting somewhere said, “why not offer two $40 vouchers per household?” and suddenly, twice as much taxpayer money is gone. Sorry, but if you can afford two televisions, you can afford a $50 analog-to-digital converter for one of them.

Just think of the disasters that await on February 17th! Converter vouchers lost in the mail… half the population of New Orleans joins a class action lawsuit for mental distress due to daytime dramas missed… op-ed columnists the world over go into apoplectic shock from this final, spiteful injustice committed by the Bush administration. America falls into darkness without the guiding lights of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Agence France-Presse.

I finally scheduled an appointment to have new tires put on my car, having talked myself into and back out of looking for a 2008 BMW to finance at 0.9% several times over. Since the lobby of Discount Tire is clearly not designed for “hanging out” – they have space for a display of racing slicks, but the waiting area consists of half a dozen chairs crammed in a corner – I went to Starbucks in hopes of finding free wi-fi. Surely an hour at Starbucks couldn’t kill me… right?

I have never once entered a Starbucks without being made to feel like an idiot. I asked about wi-fi, which apparently takes a registered Starbucks card. I didn’t even ask if that cost anything. I’m carrying around a MacBook these days and certainly don’t need my name in a Starbucks database, too. After I paid the guy who took my order and he wandered off, I realized I was supposed to wait near the little round thing at the end of the counter. I was disappointed but not surprised to see that $2.50 at Starbucks gets you a hot chocolate that’s roughly the size of a children’s Frosty. Then again, if you know what size a children’s Frosty is you’re probably not Starbucks’s target demographic.

In Europe are all the tables extremely tiny? Is Europe where Starbucks picked that up from? I am sitting at a table with three chairs around it, and it’s like a TV tray. It’s as if all the furniture in this place was designed by Lilliputians. +10 points to Mac for their dictionary’s simple and shiny confirmation of the spelling of Lilliputian. -100 points from EA for blocking me from playing Spore Creature Creator without an internet connection.

[Update: Typos, begone. Who misspells "Frosty" - seriously!]

As expected, Blu-ray prices have increased since the end of the format war with HD DVD.  Without opposition, Sony has succesfully driven high definition content out of reach for a lot of people.  Their players are, on average, 2-4 times more expesive than the HD DVD equivalent.  The cheapest HD DVD player you could purchase (before the format war was over) was around $100, and that was for a third generation player.  On the other hand, the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market was closer to $300.  Now, however, the same blu-ray player costs $400…that’s a $100 increase since the end of the format war, which was about a month ago.  At these prices, Sony is making it quite impossible to purchase a standalone player since the PS3 is also in that price range and features a built in Blu-ray disc player.  There have also been about 3 good game releases on the platform, so you could get in on that as well.

It boggles the mind why Blu-ray players are so expensive, when they are unable to connect to the internet at all.  That feature is on the horizon for the players, but all versions of the players so far will never be able to access online content for movies or receive firmware updates, which could possibly mean the inability to watch future Blu-ray movies.  One would assume Sony would distribute firmware updates through the mail on a Blu-ray disc to remedy this issue.  Even with this being the case, Blu-ray prices continue to rise.

It is also popular belief that the upconversion on the Blu-ray player does not match that of the HD DVD format.  This has also been tested by professionals and determined to be true.  This being the case, you can easily grab an HD DVD player for under $100 and enjoy a great upconverting DVD player for the same price (or even less in a lot of cases) as a good upconverting standard DVD player.  Hopefully Blu-ray improves this in the next generation of players, as I have an extensive standard DVD collection and would enjoy a good upconversion for all of them.

Considering all of this, now is the absolute worst time to purchase a Blu-ray standalone player.  The costs are soaring, and they will be obsolete by the time the next generation Blu-ray player is released.  If you really need a Blu-ray player, buy a PS3.  This way you spend about the same amount, plus one would imagine that you will be unaffected by the looming upgrades since the PS3 has online capabilities.  I make it a point, however, to never assume anything with regards to Sony.  I am continually let down by their utter lack of interest in what is best for the consumer.

Coffing’s post yesterday reminded me that I chopped an old 11×17″ flyer graphic into a 1280×1024 wallpaper and forgot to publish it. You can download the thing by clicking this thumbnail, if you’re really that much of a dork:

Consider it a preview of cartoons to (maybe) come! You can even buy the full-size poster, if you trust CafePress…