Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Dr. Horrible, Joss Whedon, Alternative Media yada yada

So on the heels of my last post, I just want to say how strangely awesome it is that i cannot watch Dr. Horrible's first episode. I've tried so many times tonight, honest. I just keep trying over and over. Then I realized from the io9 posts that a) it was temporarily broken due to demand and b) that I could buy some sort of season pass on itunes (see comments).

I got desperate, which you can go ahead and consider fan-crazy but fuck you (did you see the musical episode of Buffy, Once More With Feeling?), so I went to itunes. First off, tried to investigate the season pass option and when I clicked on that, nothing came up. It was there to click, but there was no option to buy once you got there. I looked up Joss Whedon on google and got to his Whedonesque site, which I'd heard of but not often had occasion to visit. I believe it's his official site though, and this was the message when I got there:

Grrr argh... Whedonesque has met its nemesis.

Due to a traffic spike caused by today's release of Dr Horrible, our host has shut down our database. We are working hard to move our site elsewhere. In the meantime, the forum at Whedonesque.org is still up and running:

Visit whedonesque.org.


The Whedonesque forum gave no insight. I went back to itunes and chose to buy the first episode for $2 (supposedly the "season pass" is $4 but I don't know what that means in terms of how long the season pass lasts). And I was told that my purchase would have to be tried again. I tried to watch the itunes sample song (also shown on the io9 link), but even that stops after 30 seconds. As far as I know, the best place you can (legally) watch even just the clip is the io9 website, which doesn't have nearly the quality of the itunes version.

What I'm trying to say is that demand for this particular endeavor broke the fucking internet. Whedon, you wanted to explore new ways of delivering entertainment and it worked. It worked too well. I'm frustrated that I can't watch Right Now Immediately, but I can't actually be mad. This is fucking exciting. What I assume was quite a monetary risk is clearly paying off. I mean good god, fucking itunes is even broken. So a big fat congrats. to Joss Whedon, and alternative media.

If anyone else is jonesing really hard (which I totally have been), I'd like to try to distract you with something else that is awesome. It has nothing to do with Whedon, science fiction, comics, etc. but it's Michael Cera (aka George Michael from Arrested Development), the intro credits are crazy hilarious on their own, and the later episodes were just incredibly fucking funny (although you may have to watch the first episodes to build up to "getting it").

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