HBO’s new mini-series from the creators of the Wire lays on even more jargon without explanation. I was unable to find a comprehensive guide, so I made my own. Here is a list of jargon from the recently aired episode 3 with my definitions. In order of appearance:

Sit-Rep: Situation report, basically the status.

Hitman Victor: radio code for a Humvee in Bravo company. (Hitman is the radio call sign for the company with a number designating platoon ie. Hitman 2 is the second platoon, Hitman Victor 2 is the second humvee.)

Helo-hot: Missile fired from a combat helicopter such as an apache.

Interrogative: Radio code prefacing a question

BDA: Battle Damage Assessment

MSR: Main Supply Route

Klicks: Kilometers

Oscar Mike: On the move

SOP: Standard Operating Procedure

Danger close: friendly units are within 600 meters of a proposed artillery target

Fire mission: artillery mission

NJP: Nonjudicial punishment ie discipline

Chaos: radio call sign for General Mattis

Mikes: minutes

T72s: an Iraqi tank

ROE: Rules of Engagement, rules for engaging civilian targets

RTD: Return to Base

RCT1: Regimental Combat Team 1

Cas Evac: Casualty Evacuation

Generation Kill is the new HBO mini-series brought to you by David Simon and Ed Burns, creator of The Wire. Based on a book by Evan Right, this series follows a company of reconnaissance marines taking part in the invasion of Iraq.

I’ve seen the first three episodes and it is interesting so far but it is hard not to compare it to the Wire. The construction of the show has a lot of similarities to the Wire; you are presented with a large cast of characters that can be tricky to distinguish at first, the dialogue is laden heavy with jargon and slang and devoid of any exposition, and scenes are scattered with dark humor and critical perspectives on large institutions (such as the Army, Marine Corp, US. Government.) Later season of the Wire went all out with having ensemble casts, and though Generation Kill has pulled back on that a bit to a set of core characters, it still seems to want cover a lot of people in only a few hours which so far looks like we won’t get to go much in depth with any of the characters. I’m still hungry for a replacement to Wire and though this won’t fill that need completely it is definitely worth checking out. Generation Kill also happens to be one of the few shows I’m following this summer, the others being The Middleman and AMC’s Mad Men which just started this week.

I started watching The Middleman when it began airing for two major reasons: 1) it’s based on a comic book and 2) said comic book is written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who was also a writer on a little show called Lost. The Middleman bears a superficial resemblance to Men in Black (and—gasp!—a novel I was working on last year): young aspiring artist Wendy Watson is recruited by a mysterious guy known only as—you guessed it—the Middleman to help fight off aliens, zombies, and evil masterminds bent on taking over the earth. Possibly using gun-toting gorillas. While it might seem like strange fare for a “family” channel, what with references to sex and frequent bleeped-out swears for comic effect, the show maintains a wacky fun vibe chiefly because of its enthusiastic leads: Matt Keeslar as the all-American Navy SEAL turned planetary hero and the charming Natalie Morales (whom I failed to resist as my new TV crush) as the sarcastic and plucky Wendy. The plots are often silly (the last episode featured aliens masquerading as a boy band), but enjoyable, and the writing is at times sharp enough that it might slide right past you without your noticing. Having read that the show’s ratings are not performing as well as they should be gives me even more reason to mention it to anyone looking for a fun summertime TV show.

Bonus: two of my favorite PSA promos for the show.

Bilbo: “I let my principles get in the way. I punched a bloke in the face once for saying Hawk the Slayer was rubbish.” Tim: “Good for you.” Bilbo: “Yeah, thanks. But that’s not the point, Tim. The point is, I was defending the fantasy genre with terminal intensity, when what I should have said is ‘Dad, you’re right. But let’s give Krull a try and we’ll discuss it later.’”

Spaced remains my favorite sitcom of all time—heck, quite possibly my favorite television show of all time. I’d hung onto hope that a third series might air at some point, bringing closure to the characters. But with the release of a region 1 set of the DVDs coming this summer, and the likely crappy Americanized remake looming on the horizon, that seems less and less likely.

While I do own region 2 DVDs of both series, I don’t have the super special collectors edition, which includes a “making of” featurette with Simon, Jess, and Edgar. I’d heard that there was a little extra for fans at the end of that piece, so in search of closure, I went to find it online—which, thanks to the godlike nature of YouTube, wasn’t very difficult at all. So, if you’re curious about what the future holds in store for Daisy and Tim, there you go.

Joshua Glenn, writing at the Boston Globe, tries to solve the age-old dilemma: was Black Sabbath’s classic heavy metal song “Iron Man” inspired by the Marvel superhero of the same name? The conclusion is a qualified “yes,” though it suggests that Ted Hughes’s book The Iron Man, upon which the 1999 animated film, The Iron Giant was based. Glenn’s piece is worth a read, however, if for no other reason than to watch the opening theme song to the 1960s Iron Man cartoon. I’ll be walking around the rest of the day, humming “Tony Stark makes you feel/he’s a cool exec with a heart of steel.”

(No specific plot related spoilers.)

The Wire has been my favorite show of recent, and though the last season has felt somewhat rushed and some of the newer characters less believable, I have still thoroughly enjoyed it up to the end. I read a review of the last episode on CNN.com in which the reviewers were disappointed with the ending but I think it the ending is appropriate and is very consistent with the message that David Simon is trying to send throughout the 5 seasons. Some characters stories feel more concluded than others, and some are more “just” than others, but the overall message is that life continues, Baltimore will still be Baltimore, and the institutions that make up our world will stay on their respective courses.

Anybody else here read io9? It’s Gawker’s new science-fiction blog, edited by the people who put together She’s Such a Geek! (well, at least that’s where I know them from). I’ve been enjoying it, but I actually had to quit reading it, and I wrote them a note explaining as much.

See, if I wanted to go to a spoiler site, I’d go to a spoiler site; but this blog has spoilers kind of mixed in with all kinds of other information. It’s set to send the entire content of posts to RSS readers (rather than hiding spoilers beneath the “more” tag), and occasionally contains images that you can’t really skip over as easily as refusing to read a block of text (such as when I saw the Cloverfield monster the day before I went to see the movie).

I do need to take the site off my reading list, and I do think that hiding images and spoiler text for recent releases “after the jump” would help—but, as I realized shortly after I wrote the note to them, I do recognize that it’s really hard to qualify what counts as a “spoiler” without hamstringing your entire blog. I mean, to some people, any kind of foreknowledge of a movie might feel like a spoiler. I know some people who try to avoid trailers, even, when they’re for a particularly anticipated release. And, just to be clear, I’m not recommending that blogs like io9 tiptoe around the details of Tron. After a movie has been out on the home market awhile, the ending is probably considered public knowledge. You don’t apologize for noting in passing that Romeo and Juliet die at the end, right?

I read other major entertainment blogs (and Gawker blogs), including some that cover SF movie releases, and the other ones never make me feel like I’m in danger of reading a spoiler at any moment. Do I just have weirdly specific ideas of what counts as a “spoiler,” or has anybody else experienced similar problems reading content online?

I have a handy little widget in my Dashboard that tells me when the next episode of shows I’m watching are airing. There are about 22 series listed in there, 19 of which should be current shows (assuming that Bionic Woman, Journeyman, and Reaper are all dead). This is what it looks like right now. Man, is that depressing. Add in the list of spring premiere dates that AICN just put up, which lists about 70 shows, about half of which are reality programming. An interesting point raised by one site that I read: note that despite the amount of gaps on the schedule, most of that room is being filled by reality entertainment programming and not, say, news programming, which there’s an endless supply of that doesn’t require writers. Not surprising, perhaps, but certainly interesting.

As we’ve seen, I have a strenuous regimen of television watching—one that, if confined to traditional broadcast methods, would probably occupy most evenings of my week, lowering my productivity to near-zero. But we live in the twenty-first century and so technology helps me take what once might have been a crippling condition and make it manageable.

Unlike music and movie piracy, television piracy didn’t really start to become popular until the advent of BitTorrent. While TV shows are usually shorter than movies and thus have smaller file sizes, they more than make up for that smaller size with increased frequency. Distributing a movie is difficult enough, but if you’re trying to keep up with a weekly show, there’s a heck of a lot more data to be transferred on a repeated basis. BitTorrent made that much easier, due to a couple of factors: 1) The de-centralized nature of the file-swapping technology shares the burden by making every downloader a server as well, which leads to 2) the somewhat counterintuitive proposition that the more people who download a show, the faster everybody downloads it.

I’ve often wondered if some metric could not be divined from the relative speeds of downloading. Some shows seem to transfer very quickly, while others simply crawl. This is due in part to differences like file size—for example, downloading an entire season usually takes longer than downloading a single episode—the overriding mechanic at work here is popularity. Again, in optimal conditions, the more people downloading a file, the more servers, and the faster it goes. And if popularity is the deciding factor, it would seem logical (if simplistic) to conclude that the shows that download the fastest are the most popular.

Television ratings are an imperfect science—if they can even be called a science. Even today, Nielsen relies heavily on written diaries kept by their selected “families,” tracking their television watching habits (they do have an electronic device called a “Set Meter” as well, and have been slowly adapting to other forms of technology—while the company moved to start including digital video recorders, such as TiVo, in ratings, it did not do so until 2005).

But do ratings even work?
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