Roughnecks Prelim

I've been watching Roughnecks: Starship Troopers on Veoh for the last couple of days. I vaguely remembered being impressed by the series when it first aired, and now that I'm watching the episodes in order, I've got to say that it's about as good as I remembered.

I didn't much like the Verhoeven film, but the series improves on the film in some major ways. What's ultimately frustrating about the series is the limitations they had to impose in order to produce a kid-friendly animated series, as well as the variable quality among the episodes (the production schedule was so mismanaged that they had to farm the work out to four different companies to get all the episodes done, and they still ended up four short).

I'll have more in depth to say about the series after I've worked my way through it. I'm about a third of the way through right now.

But one thing I can say is that I prefer Hulu to Veoh. I haven't had as many glitching/freezing problems on Veoh, but they have never, not once, caught a commercial break in the right place. It's always 3-4 seconds off. So the scene will cut right in mid-dialogue, you'll get a crappy Honda commercial with some Obama voter blithely asserting that the next 30 years will be full of "horrors" that will leave us "traumatized" (but buy a Honda anyway), and then the program comes back for a few seconds before fading to black on a cliffhanger that comes back almost immediately. It's annoying.

I also like the way Hulu organizes their content. Veoh's filters do the same crap you get in spreadsheets, where the number 10 immediately follows 1, and you have to scroll to the 20's to find episode 2. Plus their thumbnail take up a lot more room. Hulu lists shows in proper order, with thumbnails on appearing on mouseover, so you get more choices on one screen.

But Hulu doesn't have Roughnecks, so I'm making do with Veoh for a while.

Oops

So here it is, 11:30 p.m., and I've just realized that it's Wednesday and I've got no Big Audio Wednesday update. Chalk it up to severe depression over a personal mess and post-Atom Man exhaustion.

Anyway, I've been rewatching Buffy on Hulu lately. I got onto the Buffy train late--Season Four, actually, which is when the show had already passed its peak--and even though I worked at a TV station that aired the show in syndication, I had still never actually watched all the episodes, especially in order. I'm almost halfway through Season Two now, both anticipating and dreading the moment when Angel switches from Love Interest to Big Bad.

The biggest problem with Buffy on Hulu, though, is that it seems to hang up in the player even worse than other shows. The show will lock up and the player bar will suddenly announce that it is "buffering..."

That's right. Hulu has to Buffer the Vampire Slayer.

Had to say it. I'm not proud of it, but it had to be done.