First of all, we’d like to wish all of you who’ve stuck it out with us for the last year Happy Birthday. Indeed, GWC will be one year old tomorrow. We were saving the new design for tomorrow, but we ran into some issues that forced us to go ahead with it. So here ’tis.
You’ll notice a couple of quick advantages. For example, the new site actually works in Firefox, IE, and even Safari. (Yes, some of us have Macs, too. So we felt your pain with the old site.) And certainly the new site offers Sean a much better opportunity to show off his design capabilities.Â
You’ll also notice two tabs up at the top which don’t work yet:
ForumÂ
For the first year of GWC we studiously avoided adding a forum. We felt like somehow we’d managed to attract such a great group of friends and participants that we didn’t want to do anything that might shift the balance or otherwise frack things up. As many readers have commented, this is an amazingly friendly and enjoyable group.
But recently we’ve begun to feel like not adding a forum has sort of become the new adding a forum — like by not adding one we’re hobbling a community that could otherwise grow and become even more enjoyable for everyone involved. So we relented, and it’s coming very soon. We’re still tweaking the installation, but expect to see the forum tab live in the next week.
Store
While we’re by no means planning to turn GWC into some kind of sales tool, we’ve also finally succumbed to the many requests for some basic GWC gear to help you share the fun here with others. Specifically, we’re putting together a little Cafe Press store full of T-shirts and trinkets complete with GWC graphics and listener/reader-only inside jokes.
GalacticaWatercooler.com’s redesign should give you some idea of Sean’s skills — remember, he’s a world-class sandbagger — so we’re excited about his creations for the store. Hint: start working on him now to do a full-sized poster for the store; they take some time. I have one over my desk that he created — it’s a “1 of 1″ print — and it’s fraking incredible.Â
More To Come
There’s more, but we can talk about it later. For now, I just wanted to let everyone know that a) the site is back up and should stay up now, and b) we’re really, really happy that you’re here. You’ve made the last year incredibly enjoyable for us (and your fellow reader/listeners), and we hope that when the forum goes live it’ll give us all an opportunity to interact even further.
Enjoy.
Please note: we’re in the process of adjusting our hosting service and Galactica Watercooler may experience brief outages. But don’t worry — we’re not going anywhere. We’re just working out some kinks to bring you the first of some of the planned GWC site upgrades.
Update #1: We’re deploying some of the changes. We’re poor, so we don’t have a dev server. We have to tweak while live. We very much appreciate your patience.
It’s week twenty-four of our planned off-season re-watch of the entire “re-imagined” BSG canon, and it’s time to move on to the season 2.5  episodes “Epiphanies.” So why not join us here for the GWC online frak party? There’s room for everyone, though you’ll have to bring your own snacks…
Feel free to jump in at any point with your comments on this week’s episode as the re-watch is by definition spoiler free. We’ll be in and out, but we’ll definitely take a look at your comments before we start next week’s podcast.
See you here all week!
Here’s the new weekly presidental approval poll. Remember — even if you voted last week, you’ll want to vote again on this poll as this is a weekly feature and the results will vary from week to week. Let your opinion be heard (for free)!
Remember: This approval poll applies to the current GWC re-watch schedule, which means you should be voting for your feelings circa Episode 213: “Epiphanies.”
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Laura Roslin is handling her job as president?
- Approve: 63% (36 votes)
- Disapprove: 32& (18 votes)
- Unsure: 5% (3 votes)
Total Votes: 57
Join us this week’s watch-along commentary podcast for “Resurrection Ship, Part Two.” Highlights: we discuss why the Pegasus crew would lose in an all-out battle with the Galactica, wonder how Starbuck’s uniform fits so well, note how you should never trust dry people who show up with a towel, lament passive-voice decision making, marvel at the beauty of the firefight between two battlestars and the Cylons, and enjoy a tender moment between Adama and Roslin. We also talked a little about the extended Pegasus episode – mentioning Gaeta’s removed-from-the-TV-version “got any porn?” comment which led us on a spin through Texas’ old “blue laws” — and discussed Chuck’s turn from the prequel-hating dark side (sort of). Don’t forget: next week is our one-year anniversary podcast, and we’re setting aside lots of time for your calls.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
10. Paddle-ball Fantastica
9. Cattle-barn Milk Lactica
8. Snaggle Yarn Cat Scratchtica
7. Heavy-Scar Raidertica
6. Anders Rocks the Sacktica
5. President Airlocktica
4. Whiskey Bar Frakked-up Gaeta
3. Buccaneer Beertactica
2. Cylons get Knocked-uptica
1. Battlestar Kick-Asstica
*Bonus from Chuck: Felgercarb Fraktaktica!
10. By 2009, an entire new generation of sci-fi fans will have been born, and we can use the last half of Season Four to squeeze profits from them.
9. The ass-beating the network will receive from Battlestar’s rabid fanbase will be less bloody than if we waited ’till 2010, like we originally wanted to.
8. Brilliant writing, acting, music, effects, and production have all come together on SciFi original series before. And it will all happen again.
7. SciFi network viewers are still stunned and confused from recent kickass programming with BSG. We must embrace our traditional mediocrity to comfort them.
6. In 2009, no one will be left alive who has seen the 1978 or 1980 Galactica series, eliminating pesky OG criticism.
5. Wouldn’t that be sweet if Battlestar Galactica ran for five years? FIVE YEARS!!
4. By 2009, inflation rates will have risen to the point where iTunes can charge what NBC wants for the shows.
3. The gap will help to explain why Chief Tyrol is already showing little Nicky how to shave.
2. When we finally view the end of Season Four, Adama and Tigh will be old enough to have been part of the original exodus to the twelve colonies, thus ending the debate about sailing ships once and for all.
1. Three words about the women in BSG: Sexier with age.
It’s week twenty-three of our planned off-season re-watch of the entire “re-imagined” BSG canon, and it’s time to move on to the season 2.5  episodes “Resurrection Ship, Parts 1 & 2.” So why not join us here for the GWC online frak party? There’s room for everyone, though you’ll have to bring your own snacks…
Feel free to jump in at any point with your comments on this week’s episode as the re-watch is by definition spoiler free. We’ll be in and out, but we’ll definitely take a look at your comments before we start next week’s podcast.
See you here all week!
Here’s the new weekly presidental approval poll. Remember — even if you voted last week, you’ll want to vote again on this poll as this is a weekly feature and the results will vary from week to week. Let your opinion be heard (for free)!
Remember: This approval poll applies to the current GWC re-watch schedule, which means you should be voting for your feelings circa Episode 211/212: “Resurrection Ship, Parts 1 & 2.”
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Laura Roslin is handling her job as president?
- Approve: 76% (44 votes)
- Disapprove: 19% (11 votes)
- Unsure: 5% (3 votes)
Total Votes: 58
Pegasus is as close as we’ll get to Razor until late November, so this was a pretty significant re-watch. But (as usual) it brought a bit of punch(yness) as well. Highlights: we discussed the true issues around the Pegasus crew’s horrific “torture” techniques, marveled at Baltar’s shining moment of humanity, griped about/loved on Admiral Ro, went off on young relatives who don’t know who Lando Calrissian is (and how the Landster is *clearly* the character you want to be in the ‘Wars ‘verse), noted the “long way” that “Airlock” Roslin has come, comment on the sure-fire failure leading by fear brings, speculate on who’d have won (and why) had a Galactica/Pegasus battle actually happened, talk My Little Pony, and dredge out an embarrassing moment from Sean’s childhood.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
In case you didn’t catch this in comments on this holiday weekend’s other BSG bad news post, here’s the latest rumor: Sci-Fi might sit on the final ten episodes of season four until February of 2009.
The rumor, originally posted on AICN, originated at DragonCon where an attendee says Aaron Douglas and Jamie Bamber dropped this bomb — before Bamber “ripped sci-fi … saying that the channel is not used to producing high-quality material and now that it has a hit, it doesn’t know what to do with it.”
As listeners know, I recently outed myself as a prequel hater. Mr. Lucas fired up the tractor and hitched up the bandwagon by choosing I, II, and III over VII, VIII, and IX, and it seems like everyone with a hand in long-running franchise script development has climbed aboard since. And though I happily suffered the Binkster to see Vader don the last suit he’ll ever wear, I haven’t enjoyed most of the ‘wagon crew’s offerings.
Specifically, I really didn’t get Enterprise. And it really, really ticked me off when franchise execs blamed the show’s eventual failure on “the public having their fill of Trek for now” and vowed to return Trek to the vault until the “public is ready for more.” It’s as if the idea that they simply made a bad decision with Enterprise — or just created and produced a mediocre show — fit in among their other thoughts like oil and water; I mean, Voyager eventually worked out, right?
So, as you can imagine, when I heard news that the next Trek flick would be a — wait for it! — prequel, I dealt with it in my normal fashion: I whined and bitched about it to everyone in hearing range, including (eventually) our podcast listeners. But I read an Ain’t It Cool News post this morning that cooled my jets — at least a bit.
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