Hiatus

The Galactica Sitrep is signing off for a now as we take a brief hiatus. The site will relaunch in the very near future. In the meantime click these links to keep up with Battlestar Galactica and Blood and Chrome news. And you can follow me on Twitter as well.

And be sure to visit the Battlestar Wiki.

Thanks for your continued support.

Logan

11 More Days. Time For a Spoiler PSA.

Before the final season starts and the final webisodes air, Logan and I wanted to take a moment to discuss the spoiler policy around here.

Galactica Sitrep has run with a “spirgin-sensitive” policy* for some time now, and we will continue to do so through the rest of the series and as far forward as this blog is going.

With even some journalists now wanting to establish an admirably hardcore anti-spoiler stance for season 4.5, this seems like a good time to explain the policy here in more detail.

While we link all the time to spoilers on other sites, and once in a while may actually announce a tiny one ourselves…in truth, neither Logan nor I wants to read spoilers about any more of the show from here on in. I have been avoiding about 95% of them since last spring; Logan has decided to abstain from any further spoilers starting now.

What does this mean here at Sitrep? For one thing, PLEASE DO NOT POST ANY SPOILERS IN OUR COMMENTS. Even with a “spoiler warning” notice, your comment will get deleted.

You can post a link to a spoiler on another site. That’s OK – as long as you warn about it, and you do not afterwords try to discuss said spoiler in our comments section. That will get you deleted.

After an episode (or webisode, or sneak peak clip, or promo ad) has aired, feel free here to discuss anything that happened in that ep. But you should not be randomly dropping spoilers about the future episodes into the conversation. That might get you deleted.

If there is a post where Logan or I specifically warn of spoilers in the comments, or want to discuss a certain spoiler in the comments, obviously you can openly discuss that item. But it does not mean we want to discuss any other random spoilers. That will certainly get you deleted.

If you see something in the comments that is spoilery, and it bugs you, feel free to ping ProgGrrl at gmail dot com and say something.  Maybe we missed it.

[* spirgin = spoiler virgin; the state of being utterly spoiler-free]

We have a winner

Thanks to everyone who entered the Galactica Sitrep/Adama For President shirt give away. (See below.)

But, we now have a winner.

Congratulations to Brooke in Kansas.

The shirt will be on it's way to you first thing Monday morning.

Thanks to everyone who entered. I wish everyone could win. We'll try to do this again, and perhaps we can roll over the current entries or something. We'll keep you posted.

Anyone Want a Tee Shirt?

Greg Dewar of the awesome site, Adama for President.Org has provided the Sitrep with an Adama '08 tee-shirt for us to give away to one of our lucky readers.

I have the shirt right here, wrapped in a nice package. The tees are printed so they don't fade as long as you wash them in cold water and avoid drying them at high heat (or just hang drying them).

Greg sent me another one of the shirts to keep myself. It's really cool. It's made of excellent quality 100% cotton (a Hanes tagless tee shirt).

The shirt we're giving away is brand new, size large, and looks just like it does in the photo above. (I'll ship it anywhere in North America, and will consider global shipping as well.)

All you have to do is send an email to BSGSitrep (at) yahoo (dot) com with "Free Adama Shirt" in the subject line, and include your name and shipping address. I'll try to get it shipped to you in time for Colonial Day.

You know how a radio station gives away concert tickets to the 95th caller? Well, that's how were kind of doing it this time.

The shirt goes to the 12th emailer! (In honor of the 12 colonies.)

Meanwhile visit Adama for President and check out their other patriotic products that celebrate colonial democracy.

Good luck, and good hunting.

UPDATE: We have a winner. Thanks to everyone who participated. Stay tuned for more contests in the future.

The Final Countdown

Reminder: The 8 minute recap, "What the Frak" that you've probably seen a bunch of times on the internet, will air tonight on Sci-Fi during the broadcast of Creature.

Wired has a new Q&A interview with Tricia Helfer:

At a recent party at Electronic Arts' Playa Vista headquarters, Helfer showed up in skin-tight blue jeans, a red silk tank top and 4-inch stiletto heels to promote the videogame Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (she plays Gen. Kilian Qatar in the game's videos). Settling into a lounge chair, she chatted with Wired.com about sci-fi fanboys, sex, Six and Battlestar Galactica, which begins its final season Friday on SciFi Channel.

New York magazine reports on teasers and spoilers for season 4, in a slightly snarky and humorous way. (The spoilers aren't really major, but if you are avoiding all spoiler info. for season 4, skip it until after the season debut Friday.)

BSG co-exec producer Mark Verheiden reports on his blog about the next episode he wrote that is set to start shooting today, under the helm of feature film director John Dahl. (Dahl recently participated in a Apple podcast as part of the Tribeca Film Festival iTunes link.) On his blog, Verheiden goes into detail about all the prep work he's involved with in making his episode come to life.

SyFy Portal has an in-depth interview with David Weddle about the first ep of season 4, written by Weddle and Bradley Thompson. Weddle gives hints and teasers for the rest of the season, and provides many insights on how the overall story has developed over the course of the series. About the reveal of the final Cylon and the fate of the journey to earth, Weddle said:

"You already know the answer to these questions. It's all right there," he said. "Just examine every episode closely and the truth will emerge. Or break out a magnifying glass and go over that Last Supper photo one more time. Ron Moore laid it all out for you."

David Weddle will be a guest on a special broadcast of SyFy Radio airing live Friday at 11:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. PT to talk about the episode he and Bradley Thompson wrote. SyFy Radio normally airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT on Blog Talk Radio, with its first official broadcast with special guest Daniel Malen from The TV Addict airing tonight. For more information, visit www.blogtalkradio.com/syfyradio.

The BSG Cast has a new videocast with the awesome Matt & Nat reviewing the season 3 DVD boxed set. Remember, you can hang out with Matt and Nat and other special guests for a season 4 viewing party in Las Vegas Friday and Saturday.

By the way, if you're reading this post via RSS, come and drop by our site and check out our new site banner by the awesome Lauren.

Our 1001st Landing

This is the 1001st blog post on the Galactica Sitrep. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our readers for all your support, comments, and participation.

Special thanks has to go to Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune, for pointing her readers to this site (and for buying me lunch!)

Thanks also to Entertainment Weekly, USA Today's Whitney Matheson and anyone else who's said nice things about this blog, including our colleagues in the BSG blogging community. (Such as GDG, Justine, Andrew and Margie and everyone else.)

I also want to thank my co-editor Proggrrl for joining the Sitrep team last June and bringing intelligence, humor and wit to these pages.

Most of all, thanks to Ron Moore, Mark Verheiden, and the creative team in the BSG writer's room, the incredible actors, genius composer Bear McCreary and the entire crew of Battlestar Galactica for making a TV show worth watching and blogging about. Obviously, we wouldn't have anything to say, if it weren't for you and your great work.

Here's to season 4, and at least one thousand more blog posts... hopefully our celebration will turn out better than when Flat Top celebrated his 1000th landing on the Galactica....

Cheers!

Contest SitRep

Well, it's Friday February 1st, so the Tyrol Give Away Contest is now closed. We will be selecting two random winners who sent emails shortly, so if you entered keep an eye on your inbox this weekend.

To answer a few questions, yes I read every single email everyone sent, and I plan to reply to each one personally. While the rules of the contest were that you simply had to send an email entering the contest, some of you sent creative, humorous and entertaining entries. Sadly, since the winners will be totally random it doesn't really have an impact. Perhaps for the next contest we'll ask you all to unleash your creativity and pick a winner that way.

But, I just wanted to say right now that we really appreciate everyone's comments and good humor. Your support of the Galactica Sitrep blog means a lot to both me and Proggrrl.

Thanks for your participation.

Contest

Keep your emails coming to enter the contest noted below. Winners will be selected by a random draw from all the emails, and then we'll inform the winners.

No purchase necessary, void where prohibited.

Our Principles

In light of Entertainment Weekly placing the Galactica Sitrep on their list of the top 25 best fan websites, perhaps I should express the goals and principles of this blog. But, Orson said it best already:

Welcome New Readers!

Hello dear readers.

If anyone reading this today is here for the first time via the incredible shoutout we got in the new issue of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY*, I have a few things to tell you:

Firstly - HULLO THERE NUGGET.

Secondly - we are in the process of tagging our entire archive for fun archival spelunking by folks such as yourself. Give us till next week, and that tag cloud on the right column of this page should give you complete access to older posts. We are also going to clean up and add to our current BSG Links list, so come back for more excellent linkage.

Thirdly - Happy Holidays to you all.

Thanks EW.



* In the Dec. 28 issue, EW has proclaimed us one of The 25 Most Essential Fansites For TV, Music and Film Buffs. Frakking excellent.

V'Ger

You may have seen our new Sitrep Tag Cloud over to the right in the side bar. By the new year all prior posts should have at least one tag, so if anyone wants to dig through our archives, your searches should be a lot easier.

Enjoy!

News from Blogger about our Comments Section

We just received some cool news from BLOGGER about changes to our comments function. This is fun news for our readers who are livejournalists, and/or have their own .com's and want to share them here...

After just two short weeks of testing on Blogger in draft, OpenID commenting is now available for all Blogger blogs. This means that your friends and readers can leave authenticated comments on your blog using their blog URLs from OpenID-enabled services such as WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals, or with their AOL/AIM accounts.


We've chosen a few popular OpenID providers to highlight on the comments form, but OpenID is, well, "open"! You can use any OpenID service to post a comment by choosing "Any OpenID" and filling in your OpenID URL.

Let us know if you have any issues using this. We are not yet sure if this new service will actually ping your non-blogger ID to keep you in a comments chain. ETA: Note that if you do not use a Blogger ID to comment, you CANNOT get emails for the comments-chain on the post.

Our new banner roxx!

Serious kudos today to digital artist Starpollo for our frakking excellent new banner. Her art journal is here.

New and Improved Sitrep

As you may have noticed we've made some visual changes to the Galactica Sitrep. ProgGrrl and I plan to add other touches and features along the way as well.

And comments should now work properly.

We hope you like the changes.

Changes to the Sitrep

The Galactica Sitrep is proud to announce the addition of a valued contributor to these pages. ProgGrrl who has written extensively about Battlestar Galactica for the BSG message boards on Sci-Fi.com and on her own LiveJournal has joined the Sitrep.

So, now you can expect double the news, and twice as much fun. (And having her aboard will save me the trouble of stealing her great link finds. ProgGrrl always finds great BSG news!)

Welcome aboard ProgGrrl!

Redesign

I was never trilled with the original look of this blog, which had been selected from one of the many boring templates on Blogger. So, I snooped around and found a nice elegant WordPress style blogger template, and I hope you like it as much as I do.

I also corrected an oversight of mine, and have adjusted the commenting to "anyone" status, so to comment you don't need to have a Blogger account.

Mic (updated)

My new podcasting microphone will arrive tomorrow. Here's a look at the Studio Condenser Mic with USB Output - SAM C01U. So I hope that will vastly improve the quality of the podcast.

Naturally, though, I've caught a cold, and we'll see if my voice will function at all this week...


Update: The mic arrived, and is excellent. I've done some test recordings, and it sounds great. I think everyone will be happy with the results. ...Now, I just need to get over my cold.