Links – mainly TV-related

I’m still playing around with the appearance of the site and added a few plugins. Hereby, I have found the plugins developed by fellow German Nicolas Kuttler very useful and easy to customise.

What is more, I have also added a couple of new headers. The new header images are some historic dock buildings, the detail of a Victorian storefront and the skyline of Liverpool as well as a few vistas of Blackpool, namely two different photos of the North Pier as well as the Central Pier photographed from the top of the Tower. There is a definite bias towards the UK (I really need to upload more German images), architecture, industrial structures and seaside views, which pretty much matches the sort of things I take photos of.

Meanwhile, in the absence of other content, have some links, mainly TV-related:

Here is a great article on Alan Reed, the actor who voiced Fred Flintstone from Tablet, a Jewish online magazine.

I’ve never come across Tablet before, I found the mag via a link from Arts & Letters Daily. However, they have got a good selection of art, literature and culture articles, all from a Jewish perspective. This one about the Jewish roots of the classic TV western Bonanza is very interesting as well.

Meanwhile, SciFi Now, which bills itself as the premier UK SFF magazine (In which universe? Cause in mine, that’s still SFX, though I stopped reading both years ago), discusses how Stargate Universe, the latest entry in the neverending Stargate franchise, is close to cancellation, because the fans just aren’t watching. And apprently, that’s because those selfsame fans are still pissed off about the demise of the predecessor show Stargate Atlantis.

Now I don’t give a damn about either Stargate Universe or Stargate Atlantis or the original Stargate. I gave up on the original Stargate show sometime during season 2, never saw more than five minutes of Stargate Atlantis while waiting for the next programme to start and never saw anything of Stargate Universe at all. Though even I know enough to recognise that the photo shows that cast of Stargate Atlantis and not Stargate Universe, which tells you a lot about the shows and their relative popularity right there.

Nonetheless, there is a lesson in there, namely if you piss off your existing fanbase, while trying to appeal to a better class of viewer (in the current US TV climate, that usually means younger and more masculine), you will frequently end up with no viewers at all. Stargate Universe isn’t the first SFF show to make this mistake. And unlike anything Stargate, the others were shows I cared about.

While on the subject, here is fantasy author Shanna Swendson on the sorry state of genre TV in general. I’m pretty much in the same situation, except that I’ve given up on Doctor Who and related shows as well and never could stomach Eureka in the first place. Right now, the only genre shows I still watch are Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries (and that’s mainly for PhD purposes) plus the Britain’s Being Human and Misfits. I no longer watch any of the space opera type shows, which is pretty sad, considering how much I used to love that sort of thing.