Amanda Palmer’s song to her label

As I reported back in December, Amanda Palmer has had enough bullshit from her label (Roadrunner Records), and desperately wants them to drop her — which bizarrely they’re refusing to do.

The latest installment in the saga — at a recent show in Ft. Lauderdale, she debuted a new song, dedicated to Roadrunner Records:

LOVE.

Battlestar Finale

(…and no, this isn’t an “April Fools” post. To save you aggravation, I won’t be doing any of those. I’m sure you have enough “hilarious” material filling your day as it is. Take a deep breath. This too shall pass.)

The folks over at SFSignal asked various SF/F types their opinions regarding the BSG finale. All worth reading, although my absolute, hands-down favorite is the first response, by SF writer Chris Robeson.

The money quote:

“…a trainwreck wrapped inside a clusterfuck topped with a healthy splash of ‘Fuck the audience.'”

In addition to that brilliant bit of snark, he nails my opinion regarding the entire series — that it was pretty good at first, but seriously came off the rails right around the time of the New Caprica storyline (an opinion which is echoed by several other respondees — all of the responses are worth checking out).

Let The Right Subtitles In

and I watched the Swedish horror film Let The Right One In last weekend. We enjoyed it, but a lot of it struck us as… odd.

Turns out, that’s because we watched a version with lobotomized subtitles.

As pointed out (with comparative screen caps) by horror blog Icons of Fright, the DVD doesn’t use the original theatrical subtitles — and the new subtitles are, at best, approximations. They completely miss the subtleties, dark humor, nuances, and in some cases even the *meaning* of what was being said.

Upon hearing this, as you can imagine, and I were pretty pissed off.

Well, it turns out that people getting mad on the internet can actually get things done — the DVD company that released the film in the US has heard the protests, and realized that they were losing sales to people who were downloading bittorrents of the theatrical release. They’ve decided that from this point forward, new printings of the disc will include an option for viewing with the original theatrical subtitles.

The scumbags aren’t offering any exchanges, however.

According to the update, for those that wish to purchase a version with the theatrical subtitles, it will be listed in the tech specs box at the back/bottom of the package — the new version will say SUBTITLES: ENGLISH (Theatrical), SPANISH.