What exactly is Sanc­tu­ary? I didn’t get any wiser by check­ing out my reli­able source of infor­ma­tion, the Inter­na­tional Movie Data Base. Well, there’s an entry, of course, but it wasn’t that use­ful to begin with.
By vis­it­ing the offi­cial site I was able to enhance my knowl­edge to a cer­tain extent. Now I know that Sanc­tu­ary is a web-based series designed for max­i­mum audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion. What the hell? I cer­tainly like these “fea­tures” and I won­der if there’s some­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­ing up here. Curi­ous as I am, I con­tin­ued dig­ging things up. Pretty soon I was rewarded with the plot which is known to be as fol­lows: Amanda Tap­ping – faith­ful Star­gate SG-1 view­ers know whom I am refer­ring to – stars as 157 year old Dr. Helen Mag­nus. Helen was engaged to Jack the Rip­per which resulted in the birth of her daugh­ter Ash­ley. Helen’s father started a sanc­tu­ary for super­nat­ural crea­tures col­lected from all over the world, obvi­ously to study them and their emer­gence. Either way, in her work with these crea­tures Dr. Mag­nus has received some kind of longevity, which explains her age. Each episode is about Dr. Mag­nus doing research about mon­strous crea­tures which are the key to the future of humankind.

A brief visit of TV.com revealed that the new series will pre­mier on April 1st, 2007. I’m always inter­ested in new ideas and new sci-fi series in spe­cial. But what’s def­i­nitely more inter­est­ing is that Sanc­tu­ary will be web-based. Accord­ing to Stage 3 Media which pro­duces the “Inter­net Show”, con­ver­gence is the future of media. It believes that TV, video gam­ing and social net­work­ing will com­bine to become a sin­gle, pow­er­ful enter­tain­ment medium. There­fore, an episode is called webisode (That’s a new one, isn’t it?) and will be avail­able in mul­ti­ple High Def­i­n­i­tion res­o­lu­tions. Sanc­tu­ary will com­bine sci­ence and super­nat­ural to cre­ate a fic­tional online uni­verse where there will be direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the viewer and the cre­ative team.

This is exactly the approach I expected to see when huge TV net­works neglected the inter­net as a means of dis­tri­b­u­tion and began to blame it for their lack of imag­i­na­tion and fore­sight by telling every­body who is will­ing to lis­ten that peo­ple trad­ing with their intel­lec­tual prop­erty really hurt them. Well that’s what hap­pens to enter­prises who miss an oppor­tu­nity. Whin­ing around and suing indi­vid­u­als won’t change the fact that they’re mov­ing too slow. Inflex­i­bil­ity does indeed come with a hefty price, wouldn’t you say? The inter­net is the future and if the great net­works fail to see that fact they’ll have to pay for it later. In the mean­time, it’s time for new firms to step up and right­fully so.

I’m already look­ing for­ward to this new approach and the promised immer­sive inter­ac­tion. At least, I have what’s needed to play Sanc­tu­ary on my PC. Here are the min­i­mum requirements:

• Dis­play res­o­lu­tion of 1024×768
• Sup­port for Flash 8.0

Of course, you should have a fast inter­net con­nec­tion, I wager. Broad­band, most likely. Well, we’ll see. Ah, there’s one thing I nearly for­got to men­tion. Accord­ing to Gate­World David Hewlett will be guest star­ring for sev­eral episodes.

Do you need a hot look­ing “friend” to enhance your page with pho­tographs and com­ments? There’s a site called FakeY­our­Space that allows you to hire attrac­tive mod­els for 99 cents a month. For that fee you can pick your friends and even spec­ify exactly what com­ments they should post. You’ll get two posts a week and each addi­tional pur­chase of the same model sim­ply dou­bles the amount of com­ments you’ll get in a week.

I should’ve come up with this idea. Turn­ing cyber-losers into social net­work­ing mag­nets, that’d be some­thing to brag about. Well, I for one don’t like this kind of social net­work rep­u­ta­tion hack. It’s bad enough that peo­ple start to think of the cyber­space as some kind of real-world replace­ment. You never know for sure if some­body tells you fic­ti­tious sto­ries or plain truth. That reminds me of this famous car­toon which is still some­thing to laugh about. Well, nowa­days even more so.

Per­son­ally, I think that’s dis­gust­ing. What’s the use in pre­tend­ing to be some­one you really aren’t? Sooner or later you’ll be exposed and every­thing you lied so hard for is gone. What’s next? Start­ing a new secret iden­tity, book­ing other mod­els to bring some con­tent to your blog/page? If that’s the case it’s a sad world we live in.

On sun­day evening I went to the the­ater with my girl­friend. Sur­pris­ingly enough, there were lots of tick­ets left for Pan’s Labyrinth and so we went for it. To say that I was sur­prised doesn’t come close to the truth. I imag­ined some­thing like Alice in Won­der­land but it was quite dif­fer­ent. Rest assured, there are no spoil­ers ahead so you can read on if that’s what you want.

Guillermo del Toro once again suc­ceeds at cre­at­ing a bril­liant movie that takes the viewer to the very brink of falling into it. Just for the record, I really enjoyed Hell­boy and I’m eagerly wait­ing for the sec­ond install­ment. In Pan’s Labyrinth (offi­cial site) he trans­ports us back in time to Spain’s worst era of fas­cism. The film takes place in rural Spain where there are still vio­lent fights going on after the civil war. That’s where the main pro­tag­o­nist Ofe­lia, a lit­tle girl with a vivid imag­i­na­tion, and her mother come to live. That’s as far as I can go with­out spoil­ing the movie for you.

How­ever, the movie is won­der­fully done. Fan­tasy aspects and the cruel real world blend into a superb mix which is exceed­ingly effi­cient in telling a fairy tale for adults. Beau­ti­ful CGI effects are in stark con­trast to the bru­tal and rather vio­lent real world of fas­cist Spain in 1944. Wher­ever you look one encoun­ters the great love for detail which has been put into the mak­ing of the movie. That makes the film to an incred­i­ble achieve­ment which amazes and enthralls the viewer. It’s one of the great­est movies I’ve seen and it more than deserves the three Oscars this title won.

It’s time to once again bring up some inter­est­ing movies I’d like to watch. So, with­out much ado, here you got served:

300 (Ger­ard But­ler, Lena Headey, Dominic West; Trailer; my lat­est mus­ings)
Dis­tur­bia (Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse, Shia LaBeouf; Trailer)
Fan­tas­tic Four: Rise of the Sil­ver Surfer (Ioan Gruffudd, Jes­sica Alba, Chris Evans; Trailer)
Frac­ture (Sir Anthony Hop­kins, Ryan Gosling; Trailer)
Grind­house (Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn, Rose McGowan, Quentin Taran­tino; Trailer)
Hot Fuzz (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Bill Bai­ley; Trailer)
Live Free or Die Hard (Bruce Willis, Tim­o­thy Olyphant, Mag­gie Q; Trailer)
Next (Nico­las Cage, Julianne Moore, Jes­sica Biel; Trailer)
Pre­mo­ni­tion (San­dra Bul­lock, Julian McMa­hon; Trailer)
Shooter (Mark Wahlberg, Rhona Mitra, Jonathan Walker; Trailer)
Spider-Man 3 (Toby Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco; Trailer)
Sun­shine (Chris Evans, Cil­lian Mur­phy, Michelle Yeoh; Trailer)
The Ex (Zach Braff, Amanda Peet, Jason Bate­man; Trailer)
The Invis­i­ble (Mag­gie Ma, Michelle Har­ri­son, Chris Mar­quette; Trailer)
The Last Mimzy (Rhi­an­non Leigh Wryn, Chris O’Neil, Rainn Wil­son; Trailer)
The Num­ber 23 (Jim Car­rey, Vir­ginia Mad­sen, Logan Ler­man; Trailer; my mus­ings)

Shrek the Third (Trailer)
The Simp­sons Movie (Trailer)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles (Trailer)

If you’re using Fire­fox you’ve surely heard of some­thing called Exten­sions. These add-ons – as the term exten­sion already sug­gests – let you extend and per­son­al­ize your Fire­fox instal­la­tion. There is lotta crap out there, though, which trans­forms the task of find­ing good exten­sions into a real chal­lenge. I’ve already listed the exten­sions I use here. Now it’s time for an update since I got my hands on some new exten­sions pro­vid­ing me with ever more fea­tures I really like.

First off, I installed the All-in-One-Sidebar, which makes – prop­erly con­fig­ured – many options more eas­ily acces­si­ble. Addi­tion­ally, I don’t need the Slim Exten­sion List any more; the AiOS takes care about that too.
Next, I stum­bled over loca­tion­bar². The author claims that it reduces the spoof­ing risk but that’s up to the user, I guess. How­ever, the other fea­tures are of more inter­est to me and the lat­est ver­sion finally allows the user to change some set­tings.
If you’re read­ing a lot of news or blog posts you have to know about Para­grasp. This exten­sion adds a high­light to the para­graph you’re cur­rently read­ing and allows you to com­fort­ably nav­i­gate a site by mov­ing the high­light. No more get­ting lost in long arti­cles and mul­ti­ple tabs, I promise.

Doesn’t sound like much and it prob­a­bly isn’t, but every­thing works fine for me. One day I’ll try this exten­sion which is rumored to syn­chro­nize even exten­sions which would be the best way for me to elim­i­nate dif­fer­ent browser con­fig­u­ra­tions at home and at work. Have fun

Did I men­tion that I don’t like doing over­time? It sucks and you just don’t get the right kinda money out of it. Sure, I can take some days off (well, I should start to think in weeks) but in the end, it really sucks. I just don’t wanna be the first to arrive in the office and the last to leave. See, I don’t have a prob­lem work­ing longer than I have to if I’ve got to fin­ish things. What I really hate, though, is the slowly trick­ling infor­ma­tion flow. I could stay home for a week and fin­ish all the piled work within a few days with­out even begin­ning to sweat. Result: I’m doing over­time for noth­ing because I spend most of my time with wait­ing, doing things I have to undo later on, and doing pri­vate stuff.

That’s not the worst, though. Guess what! Every time I’d like to cre­ate a new post here some­thing hap­pens. Mur­phy is absolutely right. So, you think I’ve writ­ten this short piece of text within a three-minute time frame? If so, you’re damn wrong. Actu­ally, I’ve tried for nearly six hours to get it done. I really love work (when there’s noth­ing to do, of course). Bah, I had some other things in mind when I began writ­ing but I’ll come up with them later. See ya.