Nerdommendations

APP: TWEETDECK

If you know me at all you’ve probably been bored to the point of cutting yourself while listening to me blab like a chatty cheerleader about Twitter. While I enjoy the mobile kick-assery of Tweetie for iPhone, Tweetdeck provides an excellent desktop experience for tweet-ninjas and tweet-noobs alike. It runs on Adobe’s AIR platform and gives you a broody Raven-esque window (Poe “Raven” not Simone “Raven”) for culling and sending your syncopated ramblings.

The turbo power of Tweetdeck lies in its lateral placement of multiple customizable search windows: your friends, @mentions, direct messages, #urethra, whatever you want. Also, it has a link-shrinkage function and will automatically Twitpic any photo you throw at it. Alerts pop up whenever you have incoming tweets, which eliminate the need for constant refreshing. RT, DM & reply-to functions pop up when you hover over the avatars. Aces!

The only downsides to the application are that it can’t manage multiple user accounts and it is incapable of jerking you off.

DEVICE: ROKU DIGITAL VIDEO PLAYER

What if Apple TV was smaller, cheaper and had access to more titles? This is the question that the sharp humans over at Roku technologies have answered. The tiny black box hooks up via RCA, HDMI or S-Video to your televisioning device and streams movies instantly. Originally tethered only to Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” service, a relatively recent deal with Amazon has kicked the door open for, dare I say “shitloads” of entertainment.

The unit itself is only $99 and carries no monthly fees. As part of your Netflix account, you don’t pay anything extra, although not all of its library is streamable just yet. Still, there are 12,000 titles available and more added every day. With Amazon’s Video on Demand you have to pay per title and have access to 40,000+ with a small but growing percentage in HD.

Setup is easy and makes you feel like you’re living in “the not-too-distant future.” Visit roku.com for good times.

TV: ODYSSEY 5

What would you do if you were suddenly sent back in time to prevent the Earth from blowing up? Well, you’d probably crap yourself a lot in between sobs and shell shock. Fortunately, an hour of crap-crying every week makes bad television so Manny Coto (who now produces 24) made Odyssey 5. The pilot episode starts with five astronauts, led by Peter Weller, hovering over the Earth when it blows into bit-sized chunks. As they are resigned to die one of those sleepy-time oxygen-deprived deaths that all the kids are always talking about, an alien being turns up and offers to send their conscious minds back five years to solve the mystery and prevent the destruction of Mother Earth. Naturally they accept this offer so that the series doesn’t end after fifteen minutes. What follows is a fantastic sci-fi whodunnit with computer beings and synthetic humans.

Though everyone on the show does a great job – e.g., Peter Weller and Sebastien Roche’s mutant facial hair – it isn’t perfect. It can get a little heavy-handed sometimes and some of the shots and music feel, for lack of a better word, “Canadian.” The show was shot in Canada for Showtime (swearing & tits alert) in 2002, and though there are reports that it was the highest-rated show on the network at the time it was not renewed. All that exists are the twenty episodes that could fit nicely into your Netflix queue.

SPOILER ALERT: There is nothing to spoil. The series ends on a cliffhanger and doesn’t resolve. If you can enjoy the ride in spite of that, get it. It won’t take up much of your time and you can add one more notch to your nerd belt (a belt made of slide rules and virginity). Coto claims that he’d love to revisit it at some point but it seems unlikely. Maybe YOU could be the pencilneck that writes the conclusive Odyssey 5 fan fiction! Hey! A summer project! You could write about sending Manny Coto back in time five years to prevent the destruction of what probably would have been a really cool second season.

OH! AND DON’T FORGET TO WATCH THE SEASON FINALE OF “LOST”!!!

We’re about to be without Lost for eight friggin months. Let’s put that into annoying relative terms: You could sperm a girl into pregnancy on Wednesday and she could be squeezing out a reasonably well-formed human as the next new episode airs. I was recently lucky enough to do a nerd-panel at Meltdown Comics with Damon Lindelof, one of the show’s co-creators. While speculating about the wrap up of the series in May of 2010, I pitched a couple of ideas to Damon about what I thought might be outcome:

1. Jacob is actually a radioactive polar bear who accidentally manipulates time with farts that are mistaken for the smoke monster. After failing to thoroughly cook a pawful of shrimp with his eyes, a bad case of salmonella causes a gastric disturbance that literally rips time from the fabric of the universe and everyone dies, rendering everything that ever happened on the show pointless.
2. The Dharma Initiative turns out to be a government-funded organization whose sole directive is to go back in time to prevent the show Dharma & Greg from being made.
3. Jack and the passengers of Oceanic 815 have to beat a team of Charles Widmore’s robots in a pivotal beach volleyball game for control of the island. They narrowly win and decide to turn it into a teen-sex party resort set in the 80s. Everyone takes out their tits as the credits roll and .38 Special’s “Back to Paradise” plays.
4. In the last minute of the series, Ben wakes up in his bed and says, “That sure was a crazy dream.” Any other sounds after this are drowned out by the collective “pop” of twelve million pairs of eyes exploding from rage.

Damon said I was wrong, but he never said HOW wrong. I speculate it could actually be a combination of two or more of my theories. In any case, he was one of the nicest guys you could ever meet and as such I want to impregnate his show even more.

Chris Hardwick has champagne wishes and caviar dreams even though he doesn’t drink and hates fish. More of his blabbing can be seen in written form at The Nerdist.