I got really upset last night looking at images of the G20 ‘riots’ but of course taking stock today it doesn’t seem so bad. Four cop cars torched, smashed windows, some police brutality perhaps… that ridiculous arrest law, and too many arrests. Yet no bombs, deaths, and not too much tear gas (?). I’m out of town in Windsor, but if the vibe of this writeup is to be believed, it sure could have been worse. Pictures of masked people smashing shit, burning cars, and rows of menacing riot cops are always disturbing, but when the backdrop is the city you live in and love – or even the building you work in, in my case – it can be horrifying. And you assume the pictures are representational of widespread similar activity, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I was happy to hear that street crews were busy cleaning up Queen St. by late last night. Back to business, kids.

I also loved this image:

(photo by Martin Reis, courtesy Torontoist)

Good to know.

In other news, I went to Detroit yesterday for the first time. I’ll have more about that later.

Yesterday the province decided not to prosecute Michael Bryant. According to the Star, here’s what happened the night Darcy Allan Sheppard died.

This is the part that gets me:

He succeeds at restarting the engine and the Saab accelerates into Sheppard, who lands on the hood. Bryant hits the brakes when he sees Sheppard. Sheppard falls off the hood. (2.5 seconds elapses between the car starting and stopping. It travels two car lengths before Bryant stops.) Sheppard stands up within two seconds, not seriously injured. Bryant reverses and drives forward, trying to get around the bike.

I’m not saying that Bryant purposefully murdered Sheppard, as I agree that it sounds like sheer panic. Nor am I saying that Sheppard is remotely close to being a good cycling role model. However, it bothers me that this car “lurching” forward two car lengths, striking a human being, is not a bigger deal. It certainly explains why Sheppard grabs onto the car (not that it’s a good idea). I don’t see why the charges don’t involve vehicular manslaughter, careless driving, and leaving the scene of a crime no matter how angry and drunk the victim was.

That said, IANAL and perhaps lesser charges will now be forthcoming. But it would be a shame if Bryant escapes all blame, as it sends the message that it’s okay to kill cyclists if they seem angry or drunk.

Excellent post here at The Legion of Decency with analysis of and commentary on the latest round of CRTC rulings. The key points:

1. Private Broadcasters have the right to charge fees for formerly free-to-air broadcasts on cable and satellite.

2. Private broadcasters have the right to Blackout signals for which they own Canadian rights.

3. “Programs of National Interest” replaces Priority programming and is redefined to comprise only drama and comedy, feature documentaries and Award shows.

4. 30% of network gross income must be spent on Canadian programming (5% on Programs of National Interest).

5. Total Canadian Content on Canadian networks reduced from 60% to 55%.

7. Reduced restrictions on where a network’s Canadian Production spend is exhibited. With as much as 25% movable anywhere within the conglomerate holdings.

8. CMF investment no longer counted as part of broadcaster programming spend.

The rest gets a bit inside baseball unless you’re in the industry or follow it closely, but there’s plenty good there too. Point number two is the one that may cause waves, as Dennis points out, since it favours the broadcasters but requires action by the cable companies:

Canada’s top two cablers aren’t going to make it that easy. They’re set to announce by end of business that they’re pulling all U.S. network feeds from the cable packages in sixty days. This will predictably cause outrage and hate from customers, which the companies will blame entirely on the networks…

This is happening at a time when it is arguably easier for me to bootleg TV shows than watch them in the sanctioned ways. It is laughable. Ha! Well, except for the enormous wasted opportunities and the dire condition of our national culture industry. That is more like cryable. Cry!

The problem with the Canadian TV industry in a nutshell is that all these guys, broadcast networks and cable & satellite companies alike, make their money showing American TV to Canadians. That’s not exactly a valuable service these days. Years ago, the US channels that were reliant on non-exclusive content like movies or syndicated shows realized they had to have some actual exclusive shows to attract viewers and to gain leverage in the New World of post-internet entertainment, where content is suddenly available through a million different avenues. That’s why we got The Sopranos (HBO), Mad Men (AMC), Breaking Bad, etc. etc. The Canadian industry could have learned this lesson long ago and actually started investing in Canadian shows. It would have hurt them financially for a few years, but eventually paid off as they could sell the shows to the US and elsewhere (did you know The Listener is a big hit in Italy?). But no, they do the bare minimum required by their pal CRTC and then defend their relic of a business model by imposing false scarcity in an age of information abundance.

I am now the proud owner of a Kindle. It was an extremely generous birthday present from my sisters. I’ve been researching and discussing ebook readers a lot with my pal Ari – it’s a fascinating emerging market. I probably wouldn’t have shelled out the bread for one at the moment, but I’m certainly happy to have one, to learn about its capabilities, and to learn more about the entire field.

The screen is a wonder. It really has to be seen to be believed. When I first looked at it I thought the “plug in the power cable” message and diagram were a sticker on the screen, but no, that’s how things look. Virtuality has never looked so physical. It literally uses no power unless you’re turning the page.

The font is actually really nice – a serif that’s flirting with sans. You can adjust the text size, but not the font, which struck me as odd, if the sort of thing Apple would do, and you sense that this product is very much the result of an emulation of Apple’s attention to design detail.

The interface leaves a lot to be desired. Your instinct is to touch the screen, but no, you’re stuck with a nipply little joystick, a keyboard(!) and a handful of other buttons. The low refresh rate of e-ink displays make it feel klunky no matter what, but that’s one of those tradeoffs that goes with the territory. Luckily, most of the time you’re just going to be pressing ‘next page’, and that works fine.

You can buy books from the Amazon store on the Kindle itself, and as I’m sure you’ve heard, they get zapped near-instantly to the device, thanks to its always-on cell radio or whatever they call it. You can also plug in to your PC via USB and transfer things that way. There’s also a free app called Calibre that can work like iTunes to your Kindle’s iPod, and will also convert files (including Epub, PDF, RTF, HTML) into Kindle-optimized formats.

You can store thousands of books on this thing, so I loaded it up with some public domain Dead White Guy Classics via Feedbooks. Also, my current book is James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, an enormous hardcover that gets tiring to lug around. I had previously downloaded a pirate .rtf ebook of it (which I feel was within my moral rights, doncha think) to try and get it on my iPhone on those days I wanted to carry my camera instead of a half ton of paper, but the document converted poorly. Calibre did a great job and now I can consume hard-boiled political conspiracy fiction in a much lighter package.

Back to that cell network connection. Here’s where things get shady, probably because the towering death lords we call the Canadian telecommunications oligopoly have entered the room. In the US, you can do the following with your Kindle:

• email documents to it
• sync with an iPhone app
• surf the entire web for free

In Canada, you can do none of these things. Also, every transaction has a $2 surcharge added to it, so a $10 new release becomes $12 and a free public domain book becomes $2. I think what is happening is that Kindle doesn’t yet have a deal with Rogers, Telus or Bell, so the prices reflect the ludicrous roaming charges that those companies bill to AT&T. No one even knows what network this thing is connecting to – none of the parties involved will talk about it. That suggests negotiations are still ongoing. Be that as it may, the last thing we Canadian nerds needed was another sign of what a technological backwater we have become.

If you were going to hold out for a future, more awesome ebook reader, I can’t say I blame you. It seems like a new one is announced every day (Nook, motherfucker!), and undoubtedly future models will feature touch screens, colour, will fire lasers & brew killer espresso. And in Canada, you may want to wait unil Sauron, Hitler and Emperor Palpatine (or whomever manages the affairs of our telecom providers) allow the device to reach its true potential.

Regardless, right now, the experience of reading on this thing is quite pleasant, as is the slim size, and the generous storage. It’s the Tardis for book nerds, and I’m definitely happy with it so far.

I bought my iPhone almost a year ago, shortly after it first became available in Canada. At first, ‘available’ was an exaggeration. I didn’t pre-order because at first I couldn’t even get a straight answer as to whether I could get an iPhone; I have a flat rate, legacy Fido plan called City Fido that Rogers hates, and at first it appeared I couldn’t have both City Fido and the iPhone. After the confusion passed, I was able to get the thing, but by then they were few and far between. Those of us who wanted them were calling random stores, getting on waiting lists, wandering around obscure malls. A friend at work got lucky in the basement mall of an office tower, but no joy for me. Eventually I did the boring thing and ordered over the phone. I got my phone some time in August.

The thrill of the brand new iPhone lasted quite a while. A smartphone virgin friend of mine just got an Android phone and emailed me to say “I feel like James Bond”. John Gruber called it “our flying car”. You can suddenly do things you couldn’t do before. Some of these are old things in a new context, like surfing the web on the streetcar, and some are simply radically improved old things, like texting without needing T9 input. But the most interesting things are things you have never done – following your moving location dot on a map, which I still find myself doing whenever I’m in a cab. Using Shazam to get the phone to identify songs. Google Voice Search. That shit blew people’s minds, mine included.

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Received a letter from the CEO of my ISP, Teksavvy. It states:

Bell has been directed by the CRTC to provide matching speeds which would allow us all to have more flexibility in our day to day online requirements. Instead of adhering to these directives, Bell decided to take this issue to the federal Cabinet and at the same time file a tariff application with the CRTC proposing to introduce Usage Based Billing (UBB) on its wholesale customer accounts.

[…]

If Bell were to be allowed to introduce UBB on this service, a cap of 60GB would be imposed on all of its users, with very heavy penalties per Gigabyte afterwards (multiple times more than our current per Gigabyte rate of $0.25/GB on
overages). This would inherently all but remove Unlimited internet services in Ontario/Quebec and potentially cause large increases in internet costs from month to month.

This is a total disaster, like most of Bell’s policies with regard to internet access lately. Anyway, he (Rocky Gaudrault) gives details about how to protest:

If you’d like to make your comments/concerns known about what Bell is
attempting to do, please do so here

Select the word “Tariff” from the drop down list.

Add the following in Subject Line “File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 – Bell Canada – TN 7181” and make your thoughts known!

This is what I wrote by way of complaint:

Please, do not allow Bell to apply UBB to wholesale accounts. I switched to Teksavvy precisely to avoid Bell’s backwards policies. We should not allow our internet service to get worse with time as every other technological measure gets better. The only reasons for it are the Bell / Rogers duopoly on internet service and their related failure to build infrastructure for the (totally predictable) growth of internet video; real competition must be allowed or we will fall even further behind other countries. Please ensure that Bell cannot force regressive billing practices upon wholesalers like my ISP. Instead, force them to invest in their infrastructure so we need not see bandwidth as a scarce resource.

The deadline is midnight tonight, so if you care about this, please submit a message.

So we decided to check out Toronto’s new dedicated poutine restaurant, Smoke’s Poutinerie.

First off, this joint is popular. This is my second time going, or rather trying to go – the first time I went with a couple friends, we turned away empty handed due to the lack of seating and wheelchair accessibility. It’s got seats, it’s just that they were all full, and they were this time, too. But it was a lunch expedition, and we just took our gut-busting lard-based treats back to work and ate them there.

This is a quality poutine, no question. The fries are excellent, the gravy a nice, mild chickeny sort, and the curds authentic. The proportions – a crucial equation that has destroyed many a lesser poutine – are perfect. You can select from a number of variations, including the usual Italian and smoked meat varieties; I went with the meat-crazed “Hogtown” (bacon, sausage, onion and mushroom – while most everything in this life can be improved by adding bacon, just this once I do regret not going with a plain one to get a clearer taste of the essentials).

It’s $7 for a plain-vanilla poutine, and variations run to $8 or $9. Your cholesterol bomb comes nicely packaged in a brown cardboard box. I won’t say this is the greatest poutine I’ve had – this is it here – but it’s definitely good shit (as one would expect from a place that makes nothing but poutine).

Here’s the problem, though. Poutine is a terrible take-out food. Mere moments after the gravy hits the fries, it is waging a guerilla campaign against crispiness, and perhaps 15 minutes later, you are in a quagmire of mush. We had only a five minute walk before we could sit down and start destroying our arteries, and already the integrity of our poutines had been compromised by the inexorable pairing of time and gravy. The reasonable response to this is to get the gravy on the side, something Smoke and the gang should strongly consider. If you visit Smoke’s and it’s rammed to the gills and you cannot immediately pounce upon your Quebecois prey, ask for it that way.

During the gorging session, and before the gravy coma hit, it came up that the word on the street is that the best poutine in Toronto – nay, all of Canada! – is from one of the chip trucks out front of City Hall. Gentle readers, an expedition is assured, but it may wait until fairer weather enables on-the-spot feasting. And so until then, this poutine reporter must sign off.

Via the funk comes a link that led to some interesting shit – this thread on Ask MeFi, in which the existence of houses for sale for the low four figures in Detroit and elsewhere, and the merits of purchasing same, are discussed. Up here in Canada the average house price is $300,000, so this was a jaw-dropper. Various points against such properties are discussed in the thread, but none says it as effectively as the keen eye of the lonely satellite:

View Larger Map

These properties are in abandoned neighbourhoods, where most of the houses have been razed by the city, and those that remain have been stripped of their guts by scavengers. Your $3,000 buys a plot of land in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This related thread on BoingBoing brings up a nugget of hope, which is “this house in an apparently decent, still-peopled area of Detroit”: – a five bedroom mansion for $57,900. That’s not to say it will actually gain value, which is an assumption we Canadians are used to making about pretty much all property. But it did spur a decent daydream, in which I purchase four mansions for the price of one tiny condo in Toronto.

If you really want to understand what’s going on in Detroit, you have to read this article from Harpers. Fortunately or un-, where Detroit has gone, may other North American cities will go, as we wade into the bleak seas of the post-industrial, post-car economy (post-economy?). The article ends optimistically, with farms sprouting from the slums. You could imagine that in a possible future, where the 50s flight of white people to the suburbs has been eclipsed by the flight of all people to the internet, and one’s physical place of work and residence has been rendered insignificant, these rubbly fields could again see houses built. Why pay big money downtown when you can do that work from a dirt-cheap dirt field in Detroit. But in the meantime, there are better things for the thousandaire to spend their money on.

Hello, Robot! The break from you has been invigorating. You were probably happy to be left alone for a while, too.

I’ve been fairly obsessed with elections. In Canada, ours just wrapped up, and the enlightened pragmatist must be happy with the results: Conservative minority. The Conservatives are trying to say that since their minority is larger than before, it’s an empowering victory that means Canada supports them. Well, what were they gonna say, “we fucked up?” If only we got press releases like that in politics. Truth is, they botched things and now they’re right back where they were before, only now they can’t call another election for a while, in which time the Liberals will replace Dion with what we can only assume will be a more appealing candidate. Who will it be, though, I wonder?

My politics slot me into the extreme bottom left corner of this scale. I’m a small-state leftist. I don’t like the state intervening in people’s lives, yet I do believe we have an obligation to support those going through tough times, and I believe there are spheres of life in which the profit motive has no place. I consider large corporations more of a threat to the typical citizen than the government, yet I’m a huge fan of small business.

Yeah, what are you gonna do. I guess I’d be an anarchist if I thought any of the anarchist models would actually work in real life. So I’m not pretending I have all the answers. Hell, if the best Plato could come up with is the artist-hating Republic, yours truly isn’t going to sort this shit out.

Anyway, let that be a circuitous way of explaining how I was considering voting Green. I had generally been scared away from the Green by a) hearing they actually were more conservative than the NDP and b) thinking voting green would simply drain seats from the NDP (true). But I quite liked their platform and leader. Unfortunately, you can’t look at the Canuck political landscape without seeing a massive splintering of the left vote contrasted with a consolidated right vote that, not coincidentally, is in power. I hope mandatory voting and proportional representation make their way to Canada soon. Not holding breath tho.

On the US side, Obama gives good speech and all, but the policies are actually fairly conservative from the Canadian point of view. He’d be better than McCain, that’s for sure. It’s like Captain Okay vs. Decrepit Lizard Man and Crazy Lady – you gotta go with the Captain. And the campaign has been entertaining as hell, which has kept me glued to TPM and 538 to see what awesome garbage Team Lizard is selling today. And of course The Daily Show and Colbert are totally killing it. The writing on those shows is phenomenal.

Oh, shit. This beta NFB site is too much. 400+ films so far, more being added, free to stream.

Would still like the ability to download, but [this is good]. Hit options and choose “extreme” (no “gnarly” option?) to get maximum resolution. (via 3rdparty)

Here’s Cosmic Zoom, one of my faves:

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So, then… the iPhone, eh?

OK, here’s how I look at it. This plan is good, at least the data part: 6 gigs is esentially unlimited, so the $30 rate is comparable to the US $30 for unlimited. So, no question I’ll be getting one. The three-year contract length is loathsome, but it’s pretty much standard fare in Canada.

That’s not to say that there aren’t problems. You will still be nickel and dimed, Rogers-style (loonied and toonied?). Visual voice mail is $8, and there are obviously extra charges for texting, voice mail, caller ID etc. – all stuff that should be included in the base plan. And let’s not forget our old pal the “System Access Fee,” Lord of Arbitrary Charges.

But it is the sheer impermanence of the 6GB for $30 plan that is the biggest problem. As soon as labour day rolls around, it will vanish like a dream in the morning, replaced by the harsh ringing of the disputed, horrible plans that Rogers originally announced.

Essentially, Rogers is buying the nerds off.

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Sorta

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate by August 31 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan.

It ain’t unlimited, but it’s waaaay better compared to what they were originally offering, and to other Canadian rates. Here’s a Globe article.

Here’s the executive update on what’s happened since our last post. (July 7 – now even more updated!)

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When I try to access the newsmaking anti-Rogers petition site, I get a 403 forbidden error. However, I’m still seeing referrals coming in from it, so some people are getting through. Hordes of angry commenters are assuming that Rogers themselves are blocking the site, which is hilarious but probably untrue as I’m on Bell and can’t get through. I’d assume the traffic took the server down, and then it was misconfigured upon return, but that doesn’t explain how people are still visiting it. Hmm..

UPDATE: It’s back, and it was a server issue.

The Rogers & Fido monthly iPhone plan details are now out and, well, they suck. The degree of their suckitude in your eyes will depend on your level of resignation to the ways of the Canadian wireless tri-opoly.

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So there was the big WWDC keynote today. There were big announcements – 3G iPhone for $199, app store not ready yet, .mac is now Mobile me and looks actually worth the money now maybe – but the biggest for us in the .ca is this page. iPhone coming to Canada July 11. It’s listed in the Canadian Apple Store site, but it doesn’t let you buy it, just says it’s available at Rogers and Fido locations. There’s still one big question: data rates.

Finally, eh? Movies, in both SD and HD, both for rent and to own, are now up inz the iTunes for the gentle-yet-rugged people of the True North.

As for pricing, Apple is charging $9.99 for catalogue title purchases, $14.99 for recent releases and $19.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are $3.99 for library titles and $4.99 for new releases, with high-definition rental versions for an extra dollar. The rentals can be previewed, purchased and watched on iPod classic, iPod nano with video, iPod touch and on a widescreen TV with Apple TV.

Gizmodo claims the viewing period is now 48 hours, a huge improvement over the crippling 24 hours the service was offering in the US, but I’m going to assume that’s an error. Also, prices are from $1 to $5 higher than in the US, despite the dollar being at par… make of that what you will.

And as Waylon Jennings says, ladies love outlaws. But is it worth it? I’ve been looking into this because I WANT IT BADLY, and I thought it worthwhile to share the fruits of my research.

The iPhone is not officially available here. Why? Glad you asked, Jimmy! Rogers is the only network that could carry the iPhone, as it’s a GSM device and only Rogers and subsidiary Fido are GSM in Canada. So odds are the negotiations between Apple and Rogers have stalled. The arrangements Apple wants are not typical in the industry; Rogers does not currently have an unlimited data plan and is probably reluctant to offer one.

The iPhone trademark in Canada is actually held by a different company, so that could be an issue too, although I find the Rogers explanation more convincing.

All that said, you can still get an iPhone and use it in Canada. You can go buy one in the US and then unlock it via software, or take it to be unlocked somewhere (I’m looking at you, Pacific Mall), or you can buy an unlocked iPhone off Craigslist – at about a hundred dollar premium. Once the phone is unlocked, a Rogers or Fido SIM card can be put into it and it will work perfectly (well, visual voicemail won’t work, but everything else will).

There are downsides, of course. First of all, you will have to use the phone on Rogers, and the data plans are truly fearsome. There are no unlimited data plans; the “unlimited” browsing plan doesn’t apply to the iPhone; the top data plan (as far as I could tell) costs $80 for 500 megabytes a month, which you could crack pretty easily depending on what you’re doing with it.

Also, you will get no support from anyone, and if it stops working, you’ve got a very expensive brick. And it’s more than possible that future software upgrades will indeed brick the phone – it’s happened before.

Finally, there’s a decent chance a legit Rogers-version iPhone will be released in the coming months. There are currently rumours of a 3G iPhone coming in June to Rogers – not only would the data be much faster on such a model, it could very well come with a better data plan than your grey-market gadget would ever get. That would also mean your resell value would plummet.

Then again, rumours have been swirling for the past year that the Canadian iPhone release was imminent, and it has yet to happen. But I’d be surprised if it wasn’t released before Christmas this year, as that’s prime phone-selling season. Also, Apple wants to bring the iPhone to Japan around then, which would mean they’d have to make a CDMA model, which would mean Telus or Bell could grab the iPhone instead of Rogers.

So what should you do? Depends on what you want. Occasional Robot contributor Nigel wanted his phone and iPod to be one and the same, and didn’t care about the data stuff – so he got an iPhone and is thrilled with it. I’m more interested in the always-on rich net access, so I’m thinking of going with a Touch for the time being. If only HydroOne’s Toronto-wide WiFi network wasn’t such garbage, at $20 a month it would certainly put any Rogers data plan to shame. And if the legit Canuck iPhone is released, I can still sell the Touch or give it to my lady friend.

Maybe I’m just not an outlaw at heart.

This week there was news that Bell is slowing down P2P traffic, i.e. bitshaping, even for their resellers. And there was information on Rogers’ new fee structure, with the highest plan costing $100 a month and still subject to a bit cap.

Meanwhile, in the US, Comcast is backing down from bitshaping after a public outcry. What the hell is going on?

At issue here is net neutrality, and in the US there is public debate on the issue, whereas here there has been none. In brief, net neutrality is the principle that the network should treat all content and devices equally – that internet access should behave like electricity or your water supply. And generally that’s how it’s gone up until recently, when gradually the internet providers have been introducing bitshaping (slowing down certain types of traffic, most often BitTorrent) and bitcaps (a limit on how much you can download before incurring extra fees).

Don’t be distracted by the current focus on piracy – the idea that ‘a few bad apples’ are slowing down the internet for everyone else. The real issue is internet video in all its forms: bittorrented TV shows, youtube, and pay-per-download services like iTunes and Xbox Live. Video takes a lot of bandwidth and with the explosion in online video, suddenly ISPs are seeing people actually use some of the bandwidth they are paying for. And they’d rather not, you know, make less money. Let’s not forget that both Bell and Rogers sell TV services, and online video threatens their profits in that business as well. The last thing they want is someone canceling their cable to download shows off iTunes – but if that happens, they want to get their cut. Despite the fact that their broadband services are sold on the promise of fast, rich media.

Another issue is competition. We have less of it here, and so our telecoms can beat up the consumer to their hearts’ content without fear of consumers jumping ship, as there’s no ship to jump to. What they’d love to do is sell you access to pieces of the internet like they currently do with TV channels: wanna play games online? $15 a month. Facebook? $15 a month. Yeah, Rogers already does exactly that with its phone service (the facebook part, that is). It sucks for the little guy, yeah. But it sucks for our entire country as we watch Canada become a technological backwater in an age when high-tech competitiveness is more important than ever. We have 60% cellphone ownership here compared to 80% in the US. Typical broadband speeds in Japan are nearly 10 times faster than the Canadian average. There are a lot of amazing things that can be done with ubiquitous high speed access if we’re not paying through the nose for the ‘privilege’.

So what should we do? Amongst other things, join the net neutrality Facebook group. By getting 40,000 members, Michael Geist’s Fair Copyright group was able to forestall brutal DMCA-style legislation up here, so it could very well work. Also check out this site although it hasn’t been updated in some time, the petition has 6000 signatures already. In general, just get the word out and let’s make this an issue that more people know about.

Last week, Nadine and I attended the launch party for N+, the Xbox Live version of N, Metanet Software’s kickass ninja platforming flash game (which you can get right here) N+ is coming to the ‘Arcade on wednesday. It’s also in development for the DS and PSP.

The party was at the Gladstone Hotel. There was a little play area for trying out the game. Why not experience it in video form, it’s like you’re really there!

And then read on for the interview with the creators of N and N+, the charming Reigan Burns and Mare Sheppard. Symbolically anyways, it’s robots interviewing ninjas.

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