On a whim, I went back to watch a little bit of old Xena footage. I'd like to relate my observations before I leave the apartment. But first, a tiny bit of history.

Though overall, the Season 4 (XWP Dolby Surround 5.1) box set was outstanding, I found myself slightly disappointed that when I tried to play the "Alternate Cuts" of 3 episodes that had been advertised on the outer packaging. Why: Because the "Alternate Cuts" were just that: Cuts. They were not complete, re-edited episodes, but instead were more like long strings of Deleted Scenes that did not fit together in any coherent fashion.

What's worse, the screen image area given to the "missing footage" was just a tiny sub-section of the full frame, so even if one were to use editing tools (probably illegal) to add the the footage back into the "tv/dvd clean" versions of the episodes for underground redistribution, the resolution during those moments would be horrible, and totally throw the viewer out of the immersion of the experience.

Unless.

Unless that viewer were me, and he had been refilling his brain at maximum blast headphone volume last week with a significant percentage of the audio from the final half of Season 4. (1999. The time period when Bitscape almost lost himself completely to the pastime of Xena fanfic addiction. For days on end. Don't believe me? I still have a tiny little archive of my own, where I demoronized many of the texts, kept manual caches in case the net connection went down (which it did sometimes), wrote other small scripts (lost now?) to format them for easier reading, and then... well... finally gave up on it all, just before being recruited into a friendly corporate hellzone of 8-hour workdays and 1-hour lunches. Some of my friends seemed to have better deals with other companies, but I stuck with ?Soft, because I liked the way they operated, and were willing to give me some slack and a chance to relax a little. Remember 1999? 2000 was here.)

Long story short: Instead of watching Endgame and Ides of March again (I have yet to view it from the DVD in a fully conscious and sober state), I went back to the alternate cuts.

Now, with my vampire eyes, they revealed much that had gone unseen before. I restained myself to only watching one of them -- The (roughly) 10 minutes of footage that had been intended for the episode Locked Up And Tied Down.

Aside from being a very emotionally powerful episode (which inspired many derived works on some fanfic boards -- most of which I didn't read) even in its straight tv form, the thought of watching this one this morning seemed strangely appropriate, just for the title itself. Can't say why, or I'd lose myself on another tangent.

Locked Up And Tied Down.

Here's what I saw, "between the lines", so to speak:

A strung out anarchist named Lucy Lawless, tied up in a basement doing her own stunts, while a crew behind a camera lobbed live rats at her for several hours. It was only at the end of those several hours that they got the footage they really wanted. Too true.

When the nearly finished product was sent back to the States, it was rejected for being "too graphic" and "not appropriate for children", because after all, back in those days, some broadcast stations did air Xena during hours when youngsters would be likely to watch.

I saw cuts of Renee getting an easy workday, learning how to touch and massage another woman (the final footage might have even just been cuts from rehersal, for all we could tell). But again, this didn't sit well with the suits at universal. They wanted something that could easily be marketed to the general public again, not a bunch of soft focus slash lesbian porn dot. dot. dot. ...

So again, Tapert and his crew yielded, and shaved a few more of the most inexplicably intense seconds from the scenes.

I want to get out of here, so I'm going to jump ahead:

Finally, I saw what could be "our" last chance before the DRM becomes too smart: A free crash course video editing lesson, for anyone who knows Linux, has access to a few of the video tools, a little hardware, some spare time, and a willingness to take a few risks.

Anyone who tried to do it under Windows would probably be stopped by Microsoft's superior digital rights management technology.

Anyone who tried to do it under Apple might be able to get a little farther, but would probably be prevented from burning it back to another dvd, or converting it directly into divx format without resorting to software from india. Or something. Maybe with a little time and know how, it could be done on a Mac. I don't know.

But here I am, wasting away typing while the sun is shining outside. It's Tuesday. Midmorning. Scott probably things I've quit x13 and started working for another company, and he might even be right. But the company I work for is not registered on Wall Street. Hence, it's probably nothing to him and his neo-pointy haired ilk. (Yes, Scott, that's an insult to you.)

If I am working for a company, I suppose it could use a name. "Scavengers for the Lost Queen of the Warrior Realm." seems like it has a nice ring right now, but that's probably just because of the air pressure in here. It's really way too long to be memorable.

How 'bout we bring in Commander Riker, add a small touch of Nazi Red, and call it a RYCHE. With an altered Y.

But this is no ordinary Ryche. This is a Ryche available only to those who are Honor Bound to serve the Queen. Thus, we might call it the Queen's Ryche.

This tribe has been around for far, far longer than you or I might image, and dates back to the pre-pagan images of a Goddess who bore no name.

But now, times have changed, and things are harsher, so we must adapt. If Bush wins again, we will have to go deeper underground to avoid the Ashcroft Enforcers.

But if I damn well please, I can always -- if only in my heart -- sing the following to Lucy LAWLESS, who gave six years of her life as a slave of the MPAA so that some of us could have some joy: