#177 - get out & stay in

saturday i voted. that's not the important thing, the important thing is that i walked to my polling station. doesn't sound like a lot, but the fact is that i COULD actually walk somewhere in this town and not have to drive. of course, if i didn't have a car then i technically could walk to work and back, but that would be a trek. i'm probably spoiled by nice sidewalks and green things but if i had to walk to work it would be all sun, sweating, and traffic along the way. so it was really great to be able to walk somewhere, feasibly, and with good reason to. like the thing that i love about big cities is that you really can walk places and it's even a preferred mode of transportation. over here you can't get anywhere without a car and that's kinda sad. that means i go from office to home to store to everywhere indoors and rarely get any outdoors time. i was reading a research article the other day that said the more outdoors time people get the better their general mood. makes sense right? sun, chemicals, hormones. so they said that people who just walk for even 30 minutes outside have much better moods that people who sit around the house all day (even if it's all comfy and a/c'ed inside the house). so being able to legitmately go outside and walk somewhere purposefully was a pretty great thing.

plus then after that i went surfing and that was great. sun, beach, ocean, and pretty decent waves at ali'i, super crowded but fun anyway.

that being said however, this week is national stay-at-home week. haha. i guess they said that because all the new shows are (FINALLY!) back on television for the new season. well, terminator was already on a couple weeks ago (as well as mythbusters, man vs. wild, bones) but this week there's the office, 30 rock, and heroes. can't say that i'm really excited about heroes, since last season was a total bust and now that i remember, i didn't think the first season was all that spectacular either. but that's okay because it's on mondays, with terminator, and i LOVE terminator. it's great that they're both on the same night because they're two great examples of what can go right and wrong about a sci-fi tv show:

1. realism - this is the biggest thing, how do you make a show about robots from the future or superheroes real? terminator succeeds, heroes does not. why? writing. i've always been big on writing (as an amateur wannabe tv show critic), probably because i was so spoiled by joss whedon (buffy, angel, firefly, even wrote for rosanne and did the office once too), he was so good at mixing dialogue and situations so that you can't call his shows "comedy" or "horror" or "drama." it's like that with terminator, even though it's mostly action, there's great comedy and everything else in there. heroes tries, but all it's got for humor are those japanese guys, which they use in absolutely predictable situations of "comedic insert." in heroes, the characters play out the plot (not their fault, it was written like a comic book) and even though they try to input political satire, etc. to make it seem contemporary, it's very obviously a storyline. events occur as the episodes dictate. can't really blame them, they're still a tv show, but it's predictable (also, they need to grow an original idea of their own and stop taking powers from the x-men, i admit, i'm an ex-marvel comic geek and they're stealing every single power from the x-men, lame... or at least be less obvious about it). in terminator, each week kinda seems like a mini-movie, events unfold just as they do, the villain doesn't wait for the perfect moment to strike, the terminator acts when it knows what to do, not a second later (of course, it really doesn't because it's a story, but the important thing is that you don't realize that it's a story because of the good writing).

2. writing - gotta say it again because it's important, but y'know those cringe-worthy lines that absolutely give away the fact that you're watching a network tv show? they're all over heroes. terminator gets a leg-up already because there's little dialogue, but the lines they do drop do not derail the storyline, that's what's important. also, all this "coincidental" crap on heroes is retarded. besides, the storyline in heroes is so enormously convoluted. i mean, c'mon, terminator's got robots traveling back in time, humans traveling forward and they manage to keep everything under control. heroes flips time and location and characters and now every new "twist" just shows the writers have gotten too caught up in their own make-believe (kinda like lost, don't y'think?). now i really don't care what happens next on heroes (or lost) because it doesn't matter, you've got to keep the integrity of the storyline and of the characters so that when dramatic events DO happen they're worth happening and viewers actually care about it.

3. characters - do you really actually like any of the characters on heroes? i sure don't, they can all die for all i care. they're either bratty, worthless, skeezy (re: enourmously creepy with milk-curddling british accents), and pretty much all of them are fantastically over-dramatic (kind of like lost, again, haha). but on terminator you get character out the robots for goodness sake. vulnerability and good acting amidst explosions and cyborgs. maybe just that kristen bell girl on heroes, she's pretty. but the rest of them can bite me.

all that being said, i'm still gonna watch heroes... but i will be feverently watching terminator, woo hoo!