Lawful Good Wonk

Doctor Who: Paul McGann

2012-01-23T07:49:00.000-06:00

Right from the first line things are wrong. "It was on the planet Skaro that my old enemy, the Master, was finally put on trial." Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Had the TV movie, McGann's sole on-screen appearance, continued on this track it would be easy to dismiss it as a complete failure and perhaps even write it out of continuity entirely. Make Eccleston the Eighth Doctor. As it is I wonder why Davies et al didn't just do that. There's far more that's wrong about the TV movie than there is right, and not just in terms of how it tries to work as a continuation of the classic series. The real problems are that the producers made the wrong decisions in trying to introduce all the specific traits of The Doctor, the TARDIS, etc. to the potential American audience the show was intended for.

First off, there's the regeneration. Out of all the things that make The Doctor a unique character and Time Lords a unique race regeneration is one of the least important ones to explain/show. It's only happened 10 times so far (8 on screen), less times than the Daleks or the Master have appeared, for instance. It's not something that defines The Doctor, it's something that allows the show to continue or go down new paths. A new audience doesn't need to know about it to understand what the show and the main character are. It's simply confusing that Sylvester McCoy walks out of the TARDIS after it's been shot at, gets shot and collapses. This is meant to be The Doctor's first real appearance to the American masses, and they present him as a complete dumbass. I wouldn't be surprised if people watching it at the time thought to themselves "Wait, wasn't he the main character? What's going on? Ah, fuck this." and they changed the channel.

And that's just one problem. It's not that I don't sympathize with the producers and understand the task they had ahead of them. They had 26 years of backstory to stay true to, but they were trying to bring in a new audience unfamiliar with all that, and unlike when Star Trek: The Next Generation was created they didn't have the option of jumping ahead a century or so and starting over with a fresh cast of characters.

But with the benefit of hindsight we can compare the TV movie to the second attempt to restart the series: Rose. It's unfair, really, but Rose nailed it on introducing the basics: The Doctor is ancient, alien, and a time-traveler, and his space-timeship looks like a police box and is bigger on the inside. And it's all delivered while we focus on Rose Tyler, the human that serves as the audience surrogate. (As did the very first episode back in 1963, where we start with Ian and Barbara and are introduced to The Doctor as they are.)

Compare that to the TV movie, which starts with the narrator talking about a character we know nothing about being sentenced to death on an alien planet we don't see again. Then we see a weird blue box (remember, police boxes never existed in America) and a guy sitting in a chair listening to music and apparently those two things are related? How were American audiences supposed to understand that?

Getting past the regeneration issue... actually, I don't want to nitpick everything that's wrong with the TV movie. There's general problems like Grace not being an interesting character and Eric Roberts-Master dressed in sunglasses and a leather jacket as an obvious allusion to The Terminator, and a couple things they did well like Chang finding out about the 'bigger on the inside' part (seemed very similar to the same scene in Rose, except this scene comes after the TARDIS has already been shown, so it doesn't quite work), and the explanation of the broken chameleon circuit was quick and efficient. And the bits where McGann finds a long scarf in the locker room or offers the cop a jelly baby show how to do callbacks/inside jokes properly.

But the real issue is that Doctor Who has never been anything more than a cult show in America and trying to attract an audience with a regeneration episode would never work. Regeneration stories always have the actor playing The Doctor finding their feet, figuring out how they're going to play the character. McGann comes across as just The Doctor Beta, a prototype of what the character is supposed to be like but without the unique aspects that distinguish any one Doctor from the others. As good as McGann is, a newly-regenerated Doctor is too blank to carry a story any more complex than "There's an alien menace oh look I just took care of it." Building the story around The Master trying to seize control of the heart of the TARDIS or whatever is too dependent on the show's backstory.

I think the best way to describe the failing of the TV movie is to invoke the redesign of the TARDIS interior. The classic 'white room and roundels' is easy to take in and gives new viewers something simple to latch onto, whereas the one for the TV movie looks like a lot of sets from other shows thrown together haphazardly as if to overload the audience and convince them something of substance is there. Had the TV movie taken a simpler approach it would have fared better, no doubt. Instead it's a big, overwrought mess.

Doctor Who: Sylvester McCoy

2012-01-22T11:51:00.000-06:00

How long has it been since I talked about Colin Baker's run? Shit, six months.

When discussing Baker II's run I said the show had entered a zombie state. That kind of applies to McCoy's era as well, if we go meta and qualify it. Let me explain: McCoy's era is seen as divided into two parts: the first part, when he took over after Baker II was fired, was a continuation of the series as it always had been. Stories like Paradise Towers and Delta and the Bannermen could have been done earlier in the series with only cosmetic changes to how The Doctor behaved based on which actor was in it. Then there's darker part, after Ace joined the show and they started dropping hints about The Doctor being more than he seemed.

There was a change in tone, so to speak, but nothing spectacular. It's like how the zombie genre changed by allowing zombies to run or speak, but they're still just zombies. Similarly, this was still Doctor Who as the classic series had ever been, even with some new ideas thrown in.

Those new ideas made watching McCoy's era worthwhile from a historical standpoint. We see the change from The Doctor constantly being caught off-guard to knowing virtually anything the plot requires, something that's carried over in the new series as he seems knowledgeable of any planet or alien species he encounters. It's not something I'm too fond of; I like seeing The Doctor have to figure everything out and catch up. It makes his struggles more dramatic and triumphs worthwhile. As an actor McCoy did well playing The Doctor with hidden depths, and he is an interesting bridge between the classic series and the new.

Also, his relation with Ace and her role as a companion being embellished beyond that of any other classic series figure paved the way for the companions of the new series being given a bigger role. I like that part (though I'm not a fan of the romantic angle in the new series).

But aside from the role McCoy's era played in the series' evolution it's really just a mess. Once Ace came along and The Doctor took on a darker subtext the stories became more confusing. Ghost Light is the obvious example of 'WTF' writing and editing, but a lot of the others like Silver Nemesis jump into the story with The Doctor aware of what's going on but little given to the audience as a entry point. This ties in with what I said about The Doctor being more knowledgeable: he knows what's going on, but we don't.

So more than Baker II's run McCoy's era has an interesting aspect, but overall it was more work than pleasure getting through it. I can't see myself buying any of the serials on DVD or wanting to return to them on Netflix.

Burning question

2012-01-17T21:11:00.003-06:00

I've mentioned before that I work at a big box retailer and most every Monday night I pull a bunch of new DVDs, books, and video games. It's my main/only window into mainstream pop culture, and a recurring lesson that this is something to avoid whenever possible.

Case in point: reality TV. I'm not going to go into the standard jokes about how everyone on these shows are selfish, childish, mentally deficient signs that humanity is doomed, because it's not Jersey Shore or Real Housewives of Liberty City that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the "weird occupation" strain of reality shows. The shows about people making gourmet cupcakes, buying lapsed storage spaces or working pawn shops.

I'm not saying there can't be any interesting stories in these lines of work, but given how obvious the tricks are to create dramatic arcs or tension, wouldn't it just be easier to write actual scripts and get some unknown actors? LA is full of them, how hard can it be to find someone that can pretend to be a pastry chef or tattoo artist? Frig, you can probably some actual pastry chefs or tattoo artists that dream of getting into acting. Boom! Problem solved right there.

But that's not my real issue. I don't work in television, maybe there is some argument regarding the low costs and high enough ratings that convinces executives even if there is no artistic or intellectual merit to these shows.

No, my real question is: why are these shows released on DVD?

I am dead serious here. I want to know. Is there someone who said 'You know, the third season of Storage Wars had a great string of episodes. I wish I could watch them right now as a marathon!'? Or 'That one episode from the second season of Cake Boss was a revelation to me. It really changed my life.'

These shows are supposed to be the television equivalent of white noise, right? Something to fill dead time or go-to marathon fodder on lazy weekends. I mean, nobody actually follows these shows, looking for real storylines or character growth, right? Right?

No, I can't see DVDs of this shit as anything more than a waste of resources, and it is just baffling that there are people signing off on the production of them. Do they expect to sell enough copies to justify it? I wish I knew, because this just confounds me.

Books 78-80 : Bigend Trilogy

2012-01-12T21:02:00.000-06:00

Pattern Recognition (B)
Spook Country (B-)
Zero History by William Gibson (B+)

(Yes, another post about books I'm including with my 2011 reading list; I read most of these in 2011 but only finished the last book today)

Let's talk about plot. Is it important? Is it important or necessary to structure a book around a rising arc of build-up, climax and resolution? Ordinarily I'd say yes, because as a reader/viewer/media consumer my mindset is that a work of fiction is all about telling a story. Character and form and setting are all important as well, but they are ancillary. The story has to draw me in more than any character or world does. This may be why I so rarely exult about films that are built around a single great performance (Black Swan, Monster, Ray, Milk... you know, just biopics in general).

But there are exceptions, works that can elicit strong feelings on other merits besides an engrossing story. William Gibson is definitely someone who accomplishes this. As I've said, he seems to have a distinct mindset, and in writing he seems more interested in examining a world (a world he's created, the real world, an underground world, whatever) than in setting up obstacles for his protags to overcome. It's like science-fiction (or with the Bigend trilogy, speculative-fiction) is a forest, and there's a well-trod path taking you through it. Many authors will follow the path and perhaps stop to note a particularly interesting tree or spider web, but Gibson leaves the path entirely, winding back and forth across it, always moving forward to the opposite side, but ever distracted by something far off it.

This method can work (it has for Gibson, overall), but it also can feel self-indulgent if an author is obviously self-congratulatory about how clever they're being (note Dan Brown and his constant 'look what I learned while researching this book' asides) or as if the author just doesn't care (the finale of Count Zero, with Angela becoming a talk show host, comes out of nowhere and still baffles me for its inclusion). That dismissive view comes through in these books moreso than any of Gibson's others. Reading Pattern Recognition and Spook Country I thought, for a long while, that Gibson's interest in real-world technology was undermining the books as even the most basic of narrative fiction.

Let's start with Pattern Recognition. The main character, Cayce Pollard, is hired to track down the producers of 'the footage,' clips of a movie of mysterious origin that are posted online with no rhyme or reason, yet which attract fervent fans trying to piece together what they mean and where they come from. For much of the book Cayce follows a promising/plausible lead, but ultimately it is a random encounter and a never explained resource that leads her to the finding and meeting the footagemaker. The book then takes a detour to Cayce being imprisoned and 'escaping' from a Russian hospital before everything is wrapped up with exposition and Cayce in a romantic relationship with someone she has been communicating with online. A lot of this comes across as airport-paperback suspense (the end romance is especially perfunctory), though it is saved from becoming by-the-numbers because Gibson's talent with language and examining ideas is still in full force here.

But what brings the book down further, and what I theorize influenced Gibson while writing this (though I could be wrong), is the omnipresent cloud of 9/11 hanging over the book. Cayce's father disappeared in the attacks, and her feelings about this are brought up time and again, but never in a way that makes this a story about 9/11. It's just something there in the background, a recurring distraction. Apparently Gibson had 100 pages written by 9/11, then had to do some rewrites to incorporate the events into his book. It doesn't feel like a real fit, though. I never saw a link between the footage and Bigend (the superwealthy figure who hired Cayce and has plans to study and copy the footage's unique 'marketing' method) and the 9/11 attacks.

This same kind of impression that Gibson felt compelled to incorporate real events into his fiction (with mixed results) affects Spook Country as well, where the conclusion of the story involves misappropriated Iraq reconstruction funds. This after a couple hundred pages of locative art and a side story of a government agent trying to break a smuggling ring crossed with the day-to-day activities of one of the smugglers. Again, it's all very Gibsonian in prose and idea, but reaching the end of the book and being told 'Oh, the shipping container has a bunch of money in it' underwhelms. (Would I have been more satisfied with the shipping container containing something else? Perhaps not, but I wouldn't have been miffed at the forced inclusion of current events that the Iraq war funds represented.)

Both books are also hindered by the fact that Cayce in Pattern Recognition and Hollis Henry in Spook Country (former rocker, now freelancer hired to write about locative art) are not presented as qualified to undertake the 'missions' Bigend assigns them. As I said above, Cayce finds the footagemaker through dumb luck that Gibson doesn't even try to present as plausible, and Hollis spends most of Spook Country serving as an audience surrogate; there to ask questions of the actual experts and have everything explained to her.

Zero History is better than both of them if only because the influence of 9/11 and beyond is incorporated into the plot from the start; it centers around the search for a mysterious underground clothing designer and Bigend's hopes of getting a contract with the military to produce uniforms. But all that falls by the wayside in the final third or fourth as a kidnapping takes place (off-screen) and we get plenty of build-up to the exchange and then the standardly perfunctory conclusions.

Overall these books are all very different from Gibson's earlier ones, and not for the better. The distraction of 9/11 and Iraq and Gibson's reluctance to follow a straight narrative are difficult problems to overcome, but there is another. One of the things I've liked about Gibson's other books is that they were all of the street; he always emphasized the 'punk' part of cyberpunk, but never in a way that felt Hollywood hokey or that tried too hard.

But these books all feature characters who live in a world of effortlessness, to put it one way. Bigend is rich enough that there doesn't seem to be anything too big or expensive for him to gamble on, and everything is a game to him. All the characters brought into his web piggyback this affluence, staying in upscale hotels and spending money on whatever may be required without a second thought. It's a part of how the plot is able to move ahead when it needs to without any real effort or cost, everything being available to them when it needs to be.

This may be fine for other kinds of stories, especially any kind of thriller where someone has to travel from one state or country to another and the author doesn't want to get hung up on hammering out the travel arrangements or expenses (Jerry Jenkins take note), but since these books focus on ways in which the world is changing it's not really the best choice to view it through the eyes of people living ungrounded lives, detached from the daily toil of regular jobs or relationships.

The world Bigend and the other characters move in, in other words, is in many ways as alien as any found in straight science-fiction.

***

I haven't said anything about the characters yet. None of them really grabbed me, but I have to admit none of Gibson's protagonists have ever done that. They usually exist to facilitate the plot, but like everything else Gibson doesn't work with blank ciphers. They are all unique people, worth following as the story unfolds, but just barely. Part of it is none of them are ever really in danger of losing something, of having to make a sacrifice. Milgrim, the drug addict (later sober) from Spook Country and Zero History, may be the closest to someone with something to lose, but even his recovery in Zero is more an informed flaw than a demon for him to face.

***

Perhaps I'm making these books sound worse than I found them to be. They were all good, in their own ways, make no mistake, but none of them were more than the sum of their parts. I'm reminded of Howard Hawks' definition of a great movie: Three great scenes, no bad ones. And of one of my favorite examples of that definition: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. I won't decree which three (or more) scenes were the great ones, but that film was made into something better just by being so unhinged and playing with genre and the audience's expectations so gleefully. At his best Gibson can do something like that, but as Pattern and Spook demonstrate his less-than-best ends up being a jumbled mess. There are great scenes or great ideas, but he doesn't hit the quota.

Zero History, for the fault of it's out-of-left-field final act, is easily the best, and it's the closest to Gibson's best work. But now that I've finished the trilogy I'm left wondering where Gibson will go from here. He's said in interviews and such that he finds real technology much more fascinating than anything he could make up, so I suspect he'll stay in the speculative-fiction realm for the time being. But I hope he can at least focus his stories around related ideas and follow through on them better.

Politics Now

2012-01-11T18:20:00.002-06:00

Recently I created a Tumblr devoted entirely to shitty, shitty editorial cartoons. Seems only fair I should take a stab at the artform despite my own shortcomings like a complete inability to draw and not having much to say that hasn't already been said by many others. The media is irresponsible in downplaying/outright ignoring Ron Paul's campaign (not that I'm a supporter of his) and it's downright ridiculous the way it tries to replace actual journalism and informed analysis with clips from late-night hosts or segments devoted to celebrity tweets. (I didn't even get a chance to include a reference to the 'Send us messages on Facebook so we can spend five minutes reading the thoughts of random yahoos and call it news' habit.)

And I admit I feel I'm a bit late with this (something I've called out other cartoons for). Romney's win in NH does undercut Santorum's momentum, and by this time next week he could be toast. Though it is possible South Carolina will reward Santorum's social conservative views and breathe some life into his campaign. But more importantly the sensationalist buffoonery of American journalism is a relatively timeless issue.

The high-minded fan

2012-01-06T23:22:00.002-06:00

I am a loner. Even as a geek, even within fan communities of big franchises like Star Wars, Doctor Who or (when it aired) Lost, I stick to myself. This is just an aspect of my personality, I don't know if there was a source event for it or it's the way my brain is wired. It's not something I go out of my way to do, it's just the natural fit for me.

However, there are cases where I do want to be alone. In general, I find a lot of people either uninteresting or on a different wavelength from myself or whatever. And I know this sounds egotistical and abrasive, but that's kind of the point of this post.

Within fan communities there will always be people who take the work too seriously just as there will always be people who just enjoy it for what it is and don't think much about it. The latter is fine, I don't begrudge people watching a show or movie or reading a book just for the momentary escapism, though the former can be very easily off-putting, especially when they try to claim a greater level of appreciation for said work than everyone else. There's no reason to get into a dick-measuring contest over how much you like this film or that show.

I try to take this sort of thing in stride, either way. Casual fans won't have much to say and arrogant ones I can just ignore, when I do engage fellow fans on something. But lately...

Let me stop and say right here that I'll be talking about a specific work without naming it, and talking about a podcast about said work without naming it, and I won't be naming it because I don't want to give the impression that I'm attacking anyone specifically. I'm not writing this to lambast someone for saying something I consider stupid and it's not about making a personal attack on anyone.

So lately I've been listening to past episodes of a podcast about a specific sci-fi franchise, a couple featuring big roundtable discussions on various topics, and I've found myself getting so frustrated by what the people have been saying. Not to be rude, but I think these discussions demonstrate why fans should not be given the reins of any franchise, because they can only view it as fans and not as writers or producers.

That sounds vague, I know, so let me try to give an example. One discussion is about a proposed adaptation of the work in a different medium, and there are several factors to consider when taking, for example, a book and turning it into a film. Films, by and large, are made to appeal to the largest audience possible and studios are almost always concerned about that first weekend and how much money they make in those three days. Books aren't written with that mindset and TV shows aren't made with that mindset. Even if you take a work with a preexisting fanbase, the studio is still going to want to net the largest audience possible; at the very least they'll try to please the fanbase while attracting a fresh audience who needs everything spoonfed to them and at worst the studio will say 'Fuck the fans' and just dumb it down/simplify it to appeal to people who don't know all the obscure characters and throwaway information.

Yet the people in the discussion are saying "Let's see this idea that will appeal to the fans like us but won't a lick of sense to the prospective audiences who are coming in cold," and I just want to scream at them "What the hell is wrong with you? Do you really have no idea what motivates Hollywood producers or how these businesses are run?"

And then they start asking each other "If you were given the reins of this franchise, what would you do with [iconic part of the franchise]?" and most of the people are answering "I'd go back to this older and outdated aspect of it because I really liked that version when I was growing up" and they're just wallowing in nostalgia. That'd be like saying "If I was given a chance to write Superman I'd take away his power of flight and say that he can just jump hella high, because I really like that old version of the character." An ongoing franchise cannot last by eating its own past. It has to move forward, things have to change and if you're a fan and you liked this one part of it that is now gone, then you just need to accept that it's gone.

And it's not that these people are all saying "They changed it, now it sucks." I could just ignore them for being idiots. But these people are fans, they enjoy what the franchise is in its current incarnation, but they have this narrow field of vision of what the franchise should be and how possible it is for their fan-wanky ideal to appeal to a wide enough audience that the franchise would continue.

They're fans, they don't take the franchise too seriously or too lightly and they know what they're talking about a lot of the time, but at times they get really ridiculous in their proclamations and wishes and I just want to smack them and say 'No!' And I do feel a bit bad for being so egotistical, saying I'm smarter than them.

But there it is. That is what I feel, even if it's not a good thing.

Something positive to talk about

2012-01-05T20:29:00.004-06:00

After writing a couple posts wherein I was down on politics (something that has been a major interest of mine for much of my life, so this is a big deal) I'm glad I found something positive to talk about. Though it's outside my normal sphere of influence; being a male I don't talk about gender issues that often. I sympathize with women for being treated like second-class citizens in so many ways, but what can I say that wouldn't come across as liberal guilt?

But I saw this at work last night:A Lego set aimed at girls featuring a girl doing science/mathematics, in clear violation of the preconception that women can't handle 'left-brained/logical' stuff.

Obviously it's not earth-shattering: The set isn't going to teach any actual science to whatever girls get their hands on it, and it's part of a Lego line aimed at girls, so (at the store I work at, at least) it was in the pink and purple section of the toy department and the gender division is still encouraged on one front. And being part of a line, the character in this set could be dismissed as the token techie character; just one character alongside several pursuing more traditionally feminine pursuits like animal care, baking and fashion.

Shit, I think I'm undermining my own point.

It's something, at least. Any instance of females being represented in media and entertainment as scientists/doctors/mathematicians/etc helps tear down the mindset that science is a male sphere and it will encourage more girls to, as they grow up, at the very least become more interested in science as a subject, even if they don't pursue a higher education or career in that field. And coming from Lego, a major international toy company, this is a pretty big deal. I mean, this one set is going to reach a lot more eyeballs than a thousand xkcd strips showing women talking about science (and I like xkcd, don't get me wrong there), and a hell of a lot more children.

This is how change really happens, countless little things until you wake up one day and realize the world isn't what you once knew.

What game are we playing?

2012-01-04T09:58:00.002-06:00

Yesterday I talked about how even unabashed liberals like Markos Moulitsas will buy into the 'us vs. them' view of American politics. It is not about pushing an agenda or living by any principles, it is just about making sure that your team wins over the other team because your tribe needs to be the dominant one. And now this morning Ed Brayton has linked to an essay by Glenn Greenwald that goes into this topic as well.

It comes from the issue of Ron Paul and the fact that he says many of the right things, and yet many self-described liberals recoil in horror if someone on the left says something positive about him. "How can you support Paul when he says X, Y, or Z?" But as Brayton and Greenwald (and I) say, agreeing with him on some issues is not the same as full-on support.

And Obama supporters should recognize this! How ingrained is this cognitive dissonance? If you say one negative thing about Obama- No, let me rephrase that. If you point out one negative action taken by Obama you will be seized upon by his fanboys and fangirls who will either ignore what he did or will dismiss it with something that boils down to 'You have to take the bad with the good.' But if you say something positive about Ron Paul (and he does have the right idea on some issues) you will similarly be set upon with all of his negatives accented.

So if our man does something bad, that's OK because the goods outweigh it. But if their man does something good, then that doesn't matter because the bads outweigh it. And that's American politics, left or right. Because, and I do feel I have to labor this point, it's partisanship. Tribalism.

Only I don't feel like playing that game. I don't feel like cheering for an endless contest of basketball/football/what-have-you, tracking the back-and-forth of the ground gained or the occasional point scored and it doesn't matter because nobody's looking to the final outcome. If a game actually ends then the season continues and people focus on the next game.

All the talk about the American political system being one where everyone is empowered and real change and reform is possible is mostly bullshit, I've known this for a long time. I know it's all talk, that real change is difficult, for several reasons including general apathy from people and the pervasive influence of corporate money and all that jazz. But I've tried to hold onto the idea that change is not impossible so long as there are committed people willing to make the effort. Even as I've seen just how cowardly and ineffectual the Democratic party leaders and officials could be, I've tried thinking that the bulk of the party - the voters - were motivated by a genuine ideology and wanted specific objectives achieved.

I'm through with that. I'm done with the idea that most, or even just many, Democrats are driven by issues rather than team colors. They're not. Whatever lip-service the typical Democrat gives to environmental issues or labor or defense or whatever is just that: talk. Because when any tough decision needs to be made, specifically the one of holding Democrats to task, then most will hem and haw or stammer out 'But at least they're not Republicans' and they'll dismiss the third-parties because America is a two-party system whether you like it or not and you have to support the less odious team.

I find myself now wishing I had been following politics through Bill Clinton's administration so I could have reached this conclusion earlier. Could have spared myself lots of frustration if I had been more acquainted with the last Democratic president and his apologists. This isn't a new song, it's just a new verse. Or new round/inning/set, given the sports analogy. I don't watch any sports, maybe I shouldn't use their analogies.

Fair warning, I have another post in mind on this topic, but there's an old Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon I want to use as a reference point and until Ruben Bolling posts it as a rerun (if he ever does) I'll just have to wait.

Book 75-77: Disney comics

2012-01-03T21:06:00.001-06:00

Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes by Carl Barks (A-)
Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley (A-)
Mickey Mouse: Trapped on Treasure Island by Floyd Gottfredson (A)

(A little late for 2011, but it's my blog)

Let's talk about characters. Easily the best thing (for me, as a Disney geek) about these hardbound reprints of old comics and comic strips is that getting to see Donald and Mickey (among other characters) as more developed than they tended to be in the animated shorts (their primary medium). Donald was always a tantrum waiting to be unleashed when pushed too far, and Mickey (barring his earliest appearances) was a squeaky-clean underdog overcoming adversity through pluck and cunning. Neither of those are terrible characterizations, but they are thin if you want a story more involved than a clothesline to hang a series of gags on.

So in his collection we see Donald as still quick to temper, but he's brought down to earth by the responsibilities of raising his nephews and going through a series of jobs (usually under his uncle Scrooge, woefully underrepresented in this volume) and adventures that transform him from a universal butt monkey to, well, something approaching the type of action hero that Mickey would mimic in his shorts.

And Mickey, for his part, undergoes a more protracted metamorphosis. As the commentary in the two Gottfredson volumes points out, Mickey's character matures as the strip itself evolves from a gag-heavy series mining the animated shorts for ideas into a serialized adventure strip that produced story ideas of its own. At the start Mickey is rather youthful (apparently there's a point where Minnie comments on waiting to go to college, making them teenagers) and driven by eagerness, but by the end of the second volume he's more serious (if endlessly optimistic) and more fully fits the Douglas Fairbanks role Walt envisioned for him (as related by the aforementioned commentary). He's more confident and capable as the strip goes on.

This change comes through in an interesting way as the final story of volume two sees the unofficial ushering out of Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow and the comic introduction of Dippy Dawg (later renamed Goofy, already introduced in the animated shorts and becoming more popular with the animators than the rubberhose holdovers that were Horace and Clarabelle). As the commentary notes, the horse and cow filled the role of older siblings to Mickey and Minnie, even if Horace was more bluster than bravado and Mickey was clearly the main hero, but Dippy-Goofy, from the start, is completely incompetent and hapless and serves as a better comic foil for Mickey.

Really, the historical context of the strip and its relation to the studio at large, relayed through the commentary, is a priceless benefit of these volumes.

Ultimately Mickey in the strips isn't a wild change from Mickey in the cartoons of the same time period (mid-1930's), but the longer stories give his struggles more weight and triumphs more value, and ultimately he is a much more well-rounded character than the bland corporate mascot that most people today think of him as. Donald comes out of 'Andes' as a more radically changed/reinvented character under the pen of Carl Barks.

***

Beyond the characterization aspect all three volumes are wonderful for a shared energy and anything-goes sense of adventure in their stories. Barks is more wild and free by far, with square hens that lay rock-like eggs and witches and golden trees and classic voodoo zombies and rubber bricks, but Gottfredson wasn't a slouch himself. One Mickey story involves a giant dirigible carrying an entire township of sky pirates and giant magnetized web, and another centers around a strange crimewave involving people being robbed of their hair and flannel underwear. They're more realistic than Barks only by default.

But the Mickey strips, even through volume 2, well after Gottfredson has found his feet and shifted the strip's focus, suffer from the daily strip format. Volume 2's Blaggard Castle has obvious padding in places and Air Mail, the aforementioned sky pirate story, introduces a grand idea (the dirigible) but then ends it with Mickey making a few strafes and then lassoing the zeppelin by its... pointy thing at the front. Very fast resolution to a story that had developed at a steady, thoughtful pace up until then.

But it is a step up from volume 1, where it's clear Gottfredson was finding his feet as a storyteller (though what was unclear was how much of the earliest stuff was him). The first story, the titular race to Death Valley, is collection of set-pieces and hurdles for Mickey and Minnie in a rather random sequence, and in a larger sense there's a jump-to-a-new-place fidgetiness in how one story follows another. The most striking example is when a boxing story brings back Butch, a thug Mickey befriended in an earlier story, coming in to help Mickey win his fight. When that story wrapped up the next focused on Mickey trying to reform Butch and help him fit in with high society, a story that ended abruptly when the two chanced upon a circus and the focus shifted to Mickey trying his hand at several odd-jobs (Butch, for his part, disappears a few strips into this sequence). There's no real endings to the high society and circus stories, it's just that a new story takes over. By the second volume Gottfredson had gotten much better at following a standard rising arc story.

The Barks collection, for its part, is a collection of stories ranging from 1 to 20 pages. The longer stories are easily the best, with room to grow and the chance to travel from one location to another and the action can build up, while the 1 pagers are just simple gags, set-up and punchline. There's little deadweight here, except perhaps some of the essays in the end which go a little too intellectual for my taste. I don't consider comics a low art, but I don't think Barks was intending half of what some people seem to have read into his work.

***

A last thing I have to comment on, and this has nothing to do with the quality of the collections, is something strange from the Mickey strips. It's the design of Mickey's town. The strips in these two volumes go from 1930-1934, and if you look at the backgrounds you can see a growth from a rural farming community to something closer to a suburb. Based on what I've seen in silent films from right before this point (and the Disney shorts made at the time), I guess most of the country/world still had a view that small towns were the norm and larger cities were a unique concept, and these strips have a time capsule quality in that you can see a parallel in how the population moved to bigger communities and towns grew markedly.

It does create for some odd moments, though. Late in volume 2 there's a strip where Mickey and Minnie discuss some chickens they own, even though by this point their hometown was easily more than a farming community (or was chicken-raising common during the Depression for financial reasons?).

***

Oh, and a final note: the Mickey strips are from the 1930s and stereotypes of the time are on display, but to no greater extent than you would see in anything else from that period. It's not deliberately racist or prejudiced, just less informed than we are today, and overall it's fair for its day.

Thanks for proving my point, Markos

2012-01-03T14:45:00.004-06:00

Two years ago I wrote this. With the addendum that President Obama did repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell (when it was politically acceptable to) I still stand by all of it, even if I wasn't being proven right.

But maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. Maybe Mr. Moulitsas doesn't mean that if you vote for someone other than Obama you're an idiot. Maybe he has some particular beef with the Green Party nominee. So I asked him to explain (or rather, to defend) the tweet and he replied.

"George W. Bush. Case closed."

So yes, even the founder of a liberal-progressive site buys into

a) The narrative that Nader cost Gore the election, nevermind the popular vote or the questionable legality of the Supreme Court's decision and b) the "We must support the Dems at all costs, no matter who the candidate is" bullshit.

I am a little bit disappointed, but honestly not surprised. As I said two years ago the specter of Ralph Nader will hang over every other election from now until... who knows? For another two decades? Three?

Oh sure, the mask will change. First Palin, then Bachmann, through Cain and Perry and Gingrinch and it'll hit Romney sooner or later, once the gOP finally sucks it up and nominates him. But the real spook will be the legacy of Nader. That'll be 2012, nightmare scenario after nightmare scenario about how President Romney will make Palin his VP or declare war on Iran or this or that and so we HAVE to vote for Obama. It'd be downright treasonous to do otherwise.

Because who cares if Obama didn't have the balls (or desire?) to push for real healthcare reform? Who cares if he ordered the execution of an American citizen without trial? Who cares if he waited weeks (and until after his vacation) to start pushing for any economic policies, policies that are just going to be watered down with concessions to the Republicans? We have to support our asshole because their asshole is a bigger asshole.

And that's the underlying principle of the present-day Democratic party: no principle, just support the team.

Well, at the cost of sounding all high and mighty, I have principles. Stubborn things, they are. So no, I'm not voting for Obama (as I've said before). I'm not registered with the Democratic party. I don't overlook the shit Obama does, I don't buy into his 'I really don't want to do this' lies. I don't accept the 'we need to support the lesser evil' shit.

But many others on the left do, which disappoints me. Even if it shouldn't. I rag on conservatives for supporting whackos like Palin or Bachmann but at it's heart it's really just tribalism. It's not the need to support ideology X, it's the need to belong, to be part of a group. That's why I've gotten several tweets since Markos responded to my first one from people I've never heard of and will never meet, all saying little more than 'Right on, Markos' or 'Yes, I agree.' They're not trying to be a part of the exchange between him and me, they're not trying to make a point or come at the 'discussion' from a different angle, they just want to reinforce (if only to themselves) that they're part of this or that team. (You could also see it in the people that sided with me; even if I agree with them on some level, I'm not ignoring that they were just using the opportunity to get on a soapbox and harangue 'the other side.')

Not for the first time, I'm wondering if I should even bother following politics. I don't think my life is better for it, I'm not arrogant enough to think I've accomplished or will accomplish any change, and all I get for it is aggravation at how ridiculous people can get.

And then I tell myself that, living in a democracy, I have the obligation and privilege to take part in how the government is run, even if only at the level of voicing my support for a candidate with one vote out of thousands or millions. And if I am to take part properly, I need to be knowledgeable; aware of current events and such. But do I need to follow any pundits? Any commentators on Twitter? Read any editorials or op-eds or blogs? Couldn't I just keep up with current events and skip all the talk talk talk yammering shouting chest-thumping drum-beating?

So thank you, Markos Moulitsas. First for proving my point that the mindset of the American left is one of fear and selling out whatever principles they may have so long as the Big Scary Insane Conservatives are kept at bay (nevermind what the left will allow so long as it's not being done by a conservative). And second, for pushing me to a decision that will free up a lot of time for me, time I can devote to things that will (hopefully) give my life some enrichment and not irritate me so much. (Not that I expect you're reading this)

The year in pop culture

2011-12-31T20:46:00.002-06:00

I know I've said I don't like the "end one year/start another in winter" thing, but I have to admit that with everyone else taking stock of the past 12 months it's been hard for me not to, if just a little.

I've mentioned time and again that 2011 has not impressed me with film. It wasn't until a couple weeks ago when I saw Hugo that I had a film I would give a full four stars to (even if it is a bit twee). Then a week or two later I saw Tintin, which I haven't reviewed yet because I wanted to see it again but haven't made time for yet. My basic review is I loved it, four stars. It was a great adventure story that I'd put at the same level of Scrooge McDuck comics. But I was surprised at how much gun violence there was after the infamous editing of ET.

Anyway, there were a handful of not-quite four-star movies I really enjoyed and, perhaps, in time my opinion of them will grow. X-Men: First Class, Drive, Contagion, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Rise of the Planet of the Apes were all really great, but for whatever reason they didn't wow me completely.

At the same time, I have a Netflix account and I've been able to see a fair number of films I haven't beforehand. Among them I was most impressed by Return of the Living Dead, House of 1000 Corpses (despite The Devil's Rejects being more critically lauded), The Wicker Man (the original, of course), The Illusionist, and Master of the Flying Guillotine.

Netflix also allowed me to check out Avatar: The Last Airbender, and if there has been any piece of entertainment or art in the past year that I love, dare say cherish, above all others this is it. This series is awesome on all levels, even with the occasional dud episode (cough The Great Divide cough), and I am absolutely impressed something like this could be made and marketed towards children. I'm not as surprised to see that this was made as I was Samurai Jack, which was much more artistic and strove for something different, but it is a little amazing this was made with the level of craft and attention to detail as this had. If there's anything to look forward to in 2012 (besides The Dark Knight Rises), it's Legend of Korra.

And on the subject of The Last Airbender, there's music. SPOILERS (If you haven't seen the show, just close your eyes and listen)

I don't talk about music much because I so very rarely bring any cerebral view to it. I've always handled it in a lizard-brain fashion. I like this, I don't like that, this was OK. So there isn't much I can say about the music I really got into this year except to list them all. So there's Warriors, up above, and then there's Me and Mr. Wolf (along with the awesome video, which is actually how I found out about this song, when Cartoon Brew posted the video)

Then there were the soundtracks for Doctor Who - Series 6 and last year's Christmas Special. I Am The Doctor was easily the song I listened to the most early in the year, but over the past week, after I bought the OST for A Christmas Carol, Abigail's Song has been the one I keep going back to.

Also in constant rotation these last few days have been a couple tracks from the soundtrack to Millennium Actress, something I've long wanted to acquire but only recently (finally) found a way to download (since the only copies available for sale are on Amazon for $80 and there's no reason to suspect it'll suddenly become available at a reasonable price). There were two tracks in particular I wanted

And from the same musician, Susumu Hirasawa, from Satoshi Kon's series Paranoia Agent

Turning to books, I read quite a few I liked, such as Under the Dome, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Maria Holic, but I can't say many have really stuck with me after I finished them and there have been a couple disappointments (I'll talk about them later, but Pattern Recognition and Spook Country don't measure up to Gibson's earlier works).

A late arrival has been the first two volumes of the collection of Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse comics. I'll have more to say when I finish volume two and write them up properly, but I've gotten a kick out of seeing Mickey Mouse as a real character and not just a corporate mascot.

Speaking of which, I mentioned a couple days ago I've gotten a Wii, and Epic Mickey has been a blast. I don't consider myself a gamer, so I don't know if this has broken any new ground in the gaming industry (I doubt it), but as a Disney geek I just love how the entire storyline and setting and everything mines the nostalgia of the company so thoroughly. It's not just Oswald playing the anti-villain, but all the other forgotten characters and the off-skew version of Disneyland and the sidescrolling levels that mimic the old cartoons.

And since I brought up video games I guess I'll mention that this year I finally played Portal and Portal 2 and I've drunken the Kool-Aid. I'm not going to make any jokes about the cake being a lie (and if I do you have my permission to cut my balls off), but I have the soundtracks and eventually I'll probably buy the talking turret plushie and Companion Cube plushie.

And the last thing I'll mention is that while there haven't been a lot of movies I loved this year, I find that I can watch the Harry Plinkett reviews more times than I can most regular films, and I'm really enjoying Half in the Bag. The framing scenes are never terrible (some are really funny) and I do find their analysis insightful.

So there's 2011 and the media that made an impact on me.

The Year in Crazy Part 95

2011-12-31T18:41:00.002-06:00

Let's end the year on a shitty note: President Obama has signed indefinite detention into law.

Oh, but it's OK because he feels really bad about it. So there you go, PCLDers, there's your out. You don't have to have second thoughts about Obama because he feeeeeeels baaaaad. He didn't want to sign that mean old, nasty bill into law, but what could he do?

With an eye toward resolutions

2011-12-29T19:52:00.002-06:00

I don't see the logic of ending one year and beginning another in the middle of winter. Spring is the time of rebirth and renewal, it is more logical and poetic to mark the passing of one year into the next on the first day of spring. Personally, that's when I intend to celebrate the new year, but because virtually all of human society goes off the Gregorian calendar, I am forced to, in some ways, go along with it. I can't keep signing my paychecks with '2011,' for one.

There are ways I don't have to, however. If I stay up until midnight on Saturday it won't be to watch a ball drop, but because I'm caught up in playing Epic Mickey (I got some gift cards for Christmas and put them towards a Wii; I really only wanted it for the one game, but I'm loving it, so I'm having fun).

Another thing, one I had originally intended to sidestep, was the issue of New Year resolutions. I don't have much success, or much of an attempt history, at them; the general trope seems to be they're all doomed to failure. Also, while I understand the idea of using New Year as a time to start, I think people limit themselves as viewing only this time as a point for making huge changes (lose 100 pounds, prepare to run a marathon, etc.). As the article I linked to states, smaller and less vague goals are better. And why wait for the changing of years to make incremental changes in your life? So I was originally going to wait until the arrival of spring to make some real resolutions, attempting to make smaller changes in my day-to-day life until then so it wouldn't be as if I had hit the ground running.

But there's one thing about that which concerns me. If I had no bigger plans for the future, just my writing and some vague idea of going to Los Angeles to try working in film, that would be one thing. Easing into life changes would be fine as far as I'm concerned.

But I mentioned a while back that there is something a bit more immediate. The application process for the JET program starts in the fall. I haven't done too much research yet into what an applicant needs (part of the reason is I'm afraid I'll find out I'm disqualified for some reason, and thus the path will be erased before I even started down it; at the very least, I'd like to leave the dream in front of me while I can), but I am certain some familiarity with the Japanese language would be at least bonus. To that end, I need to brush up on my Japanese (read: more or less try to relearn everything I've learned already). Waiting until March to begin doing what I can (and should) do now would be irresponsible.

So I find myself preparing to undertake a resolution at the same time everyone else is. But not because everyone else is and not because it's the traditional thing, but because I should have been doing it months ago.

I have excuses, of course. Trying to do too much other stuff like watch movies and read and whatnot. And I know I sound less-than-sincere when I say I've just bought a video game system as I should be studying a non-Western language (with all the difficulty that implies). So in addition to making time to study I need to make a comparable sacrifice in time I would spend watching or reading. One "easy" way to help this is to not buy any new books or movies or anything; it comes with the added benefit of freeing up the money I would otherwise spend.

I also need to cut myself off from the Internet more. I mentioned months ago having to stop visiting Gaia for a week and how hard it was to not compulsively check my market listings, but there are other sites and whatnot that I have a similar trouble with. As I titled that other post I recognize the compulsion, the fabled first step toward change. So I also need stop checking certain sites 20 times a day, checking Tweetdeck every five minutes.

So what do I have?

-Study Japanese
-Watch less movies and read less books
-Spend less time online

How do I quantify any of those? With the Internet one I just have to stop myself every time I have an urge to check Site X. Going cold turkey may not be the best thing, I genuinely wonder if checking the sites (even if no update has taken place) affects my brain chemistry in some way. Will I suffer some sort of withdrawal?

And as far as the "less movies, less books" goes, I should amend that to include less going over what I've seen/read before. Try to cut down on watching movies or TV shows I've seen before, even if the familiarity is comforting in some way. I have plenty of books I haven't read yet, a huge stack of surfing magazines, and a pretty full Netflix queue. So not only should I pace myself, but I should focus on new things as well.

But there's still the problem of quantifying. Or maybe I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective, and instead of trying to devote X hours a day or week to reading I should look at it in terms of end results. Read this book or watch that movie, or make time for doing so after I've done my studying. Back in high school I used a daily planner all the time, and I was damn good at it (if I say so). Sort of fell out of that in college and beyond, when I didn't have so many daily assignments. And when I tried using a planner again earlier this year it didn't work out.

One problem I'm more aware of now is that my work isn't the best at scheduling me for a full 40 hours each week, but they ARE good at needing someone to come in on the spur of a moment because they didn't plan ahead or stuff piled up or whatever. So I'll get a call in the morning, asking if I can come in, and since I'd need the hours I'd say yes and whatever plans I may have had for that day are out the window until I get back from the unexpected day of work.

So, to wrap up these ramblings, I need cut back on my intake of media and focus my attention towards studying (and writing, which I didn't mention because I talk about it too much as it is). And what media I do consume, I need to go with the new instead of what I'm already familiar with.

Let's see how that goes.

Random question about a movie I haven't seen

2011-12-28T20:25:00.003-06:00

I have not seen Avatar (the James Cameron movie, not Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I have seen and which is awesome), not because of any intentional aversion but because it just doesn't interest me. "Dances With Wolves with Smurfs," as the jokes go. And for the longest time I don't feel I've missed out on anything, which, as occurred to me last night, is probably because there doesn't seem to be major pop culture influence from the movie.

Am I wrong about that? Am I wrong that even though Avatar is the largest-grossing movie (due mostly, I suspect, to the inflated 3D prices) there hasn't been a single catchphrase or image that has become ingrained in the larger pop culture?

Here's a brief comparison:

Jaws was the first movie to hit $100 million. There's the famous musical cue and "you're going to need a bigger boat" (sometimes misquoted as "we're going to need a bigger boat").

Star Wars... fuck it, I don't even know where to begin with that. Has there been any other movie with as many quotes and images and characters that have been endlessly referenced/ripped off as Star Wars?

E.T. had "ET phone home" and the shot of ET and Elliot in the bike in front of the moon. And I guess "Ouch" and "I'll be right here" count as well.

Jurassic Park had the shot of the water in the glass rippling as the T-Rex approached, and I think it's fair to say the entire fascination with raptors comes from the film. Not often an entire species moves up to the A-list because of one film.

Titanic had the fucking Celine Dion song (I didn't say all pop culture influence was good), "I'm the king of the world," and the shot of DiCaprio and Winslet at the bow of the ship. (The bow's the front, right?)

And Avatar had... what? In all honesty, I don't know of anything. Maybe it's because I haven't seen the film, but I doubt that if I watched it I would suddenly understand some one-liner or image I've seen here or there since the movie came out and had no frame of reference for.

Which makes me even less interested in seeing Avatar. I mean, right now I'm watching the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man (the original was fantastic, by the way) because even in all it's Narmish ridiculousness it's had some impact on culture. People talked about it. People quoted it.

Did anybody quote Avatar?

The Year in Crazy Part 94

2011-12-18T21:48:00.002-06:00

Gingrinch's time as the not-Mitt frontrunner has already started coming to a close, and this will surely help push him down in the polls:

Newt Gingrich on Sunday hammered at the nation’s judiciary system, saying that if a court’s decision was out of step with American popular opinion, it should be ignored.

There’s “no reason the American people need to tolerate a judge that out of touch with American culture,” Gingrich said on CBS’ Face the Nation, referring to a case where a judge ruled that explicit references to religion were barred from a high school graduation ceremony. And Gingrich recently has said judges should have to explain some of their decisions before Congress.

Host Bob Schieffer asked Gingrich how he planned to enforce that. Would you call in the Capitol Police to apprehend a federal judge, he asked.

“If you had to,” Gingrich said. “Or you’d instruct the Justice Department to send the U.S. Marshall in.”

Historian my fucking ass. Even schoolchildren understand the separation of powers.

Book 74: Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters

2011-12-15T19:23:00.002-06:00

Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters (B+)

Jack Kinney got a job with Walt Disney in 1931 and worked with him until the late 50's. Disney had already begun his meteoric rise with Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies, but as Kinney worked his way up from in-betweener to director he got to see the studio grow, the move into feature films, the development and opening of Disneyland, and the advent of television.

But his book, published in 1988, right before the great revival of American animation, is a collection of anecdotes and humorous sketches from his time at the studio and beyond presented as someone recounting stand-out characters and gags. Kinney lived through interesting times, but that doesn't mean he's qualified to speak as a historian about the Golden Age of Animation or the history of the Disney studios, and neither does he present himself as one. There's little to no context about, say, Walt deciding to make a jump into feature films or the financial ups and downs of the production of Snow White because Kinney was working on the theatrical shorts at the time. And at one point his personal career deviated from the studio's rise as he left the production of Bambi to, in a sense, move backwards and helm the Goofy theatrical shorts.

It makes perfect sense that Kinney would take the anecdotal approach. He went through his time at Disney intent on meeting deadlines and measuring up to a certain level of quality in his drawings and gags. He didn't know the company was going to become the huge titan it became, that the films and shorts would become classics. It was a paycheck for him. This does make the later parts a bit weak, as Kinney can only touch on the end of theatrical shorts and the fall of American animation with brief comments on how it became expensive and TV changed things and maybe the industry can be saved.

But the book is never dull, and as a Disney geek it's nice to get a peek behind the curtain of the corporate-maintained mythos of Walt and his studio. Kinney doesn't do a hatchet job on Walt, but neither is this a hagiography. Walt Disney just comes across as a boss, demanding and often strict but one of the guys (before drifting away over time). It's an unvarnished portrait, but it doesn't strike me as exceptionally unfair.

The Year in Crazy Part 94

2011-12-15T19:15:00.004-06:00

I'm possibly less surprised about this than Glenn Greenwald is: Indefinite detention has now been authorized by the US Congress and only awaits President Obama's signature, which is sure to come.

Yes, people (including US citizens) can be arrested and held without trial. True, this kind of thing has already been done in recent memory (Bradley Manning), but as Glennwald points out there's a difference between the President seizing these powers for himself unilaterally and Congress, in a bitpartisan move, enshrining them as the rule of law.

And nobody cares.

I... I really don't have it in me to harp on this too much. In virtually every way in regards to the wars and civil liberties the Obama administration has been an extension of the Bush administration. Even today's news of the US "leaving" Iraq is meaningless because a) Bush signed off on this exit date and b) we're not leaving completely. We'll still have a presence there for years to come.

That's it.

Bang On, John Cheese

2011-12-15T18:20:00.002-06:00

Go down to Number 1 on this article. This is something I've wanted to express for so long, but I've never been quite agitated by it enough to push me over the edge to go from "muttering to myself and/or grinding my teeth" to "I must go to the interwebs and complain!" Fortunately it's out of my hands now, as Cracked writer John Cheese has articulated it for me:

No, [Olivia Munn]'s not a nerdy gaming chick. She is a manufactured marketing strategy, designed to rope in drooling Internet geeks by making them think that gaming and Star Wars fandom can attract girls who look like supermodels. And it worked. She ended up with a spot on The Daily Show. She's been on the cover of Playboy. She's written books -- and here's a shocker: One of them is called Suck It, Wonder Woman: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek.

It's becoming a formula. Take a girl, dress her up in some superhero or video game character costume and send her out to a comic book convention, and watch their ratings explode.

The recent ascension of the 'hot gamer girl' has annoyed me because it is so blatantly, so shamelessly a marketing gimmick. No, these women aren't geeks and they aren't interested in the overweight bowl-cut guy wearing... Nintendo... wizard... costume? When they say they're a geek they mean they've seen Star Wars, just as when the frat boy calls himself a gamer it means he has Halo/Call of Duty/whatever other FPS with the $75 million ad budget came out recently. There's no actual respect for science-fiction or video games or other traditional geek hobbies/pursuits. It's just that mainstream society has found a way to carve a little niche within the geek sphere of influence that serves as an entry point for non-geeks.

It's like how a water park will have a little kiddie pool for the toddlers who have no business being near the actual pools and waterslides that are the entire reason for water parks to exist in the first place. Halo is the kiddie pool of video games, the first Star Wars movie is the kiddie pool of science-fiction.

I think I'm getting off topic...

On a related tangent, tomorrow would have been Bill Hicks' 50th birthday; how appropriate I'm writing this article tonight. Marketers and corporations really do have to put a dollar sign on everything, even the things they don't understand. They can only dumb them down, play up the lowest-common-denominator components like the boobs and guns, and jingle it in front of people like keys in front of a cat.

But what really bothers me is that geeks are apparently fine with this. They're fine with being condescended to, they're fine with the mainstream media thrusting memes back at us years after they've gotten old, they're fine with their "culture" being turned into nothing but another fount of money for corporations that will still, through their media outlets, truck in the stereotypes of geeks as being weak, unsocial, acne-prone, etc.

This is why I don't like The Big Bang Theory. It's nominally about geeks, but it's about laughing at them, not with them. Yet so many geeks watch it and say "Look, a show about us! They talk about science and Superman, they get us."

No, they don't. And they don't want to get you. They just want your money, just like the porn star dressed as April O'Neil wants your credit card number, not your phone number.

And I'm not saying I hate all attempts at geek "culture" being coalesced into an actual thing. I like thinkgeek.com and similar stuff. But I don't like seeing geeks try to force geek "culture" into being a thing that can be measured/catalogued/quantified, and I especially hate non-geeks trying to take it and make it their own line of products to sell back to us. And I hate that geeks allow it to happen. They don't even care.

Hugo and The Muppets

2011-12-14T22:10:00.002-06:00

I've lamented lately that there has been a serious dearth of amazing films this year, though being in Cedar Rapids does mean I don't have much access to foreign and independent films. Still, there should have been at least one summer blockbuster that blew me away, going off years past, and the word of mouth for Drive and The Tree of Life had me excited. (I need to watch Drive again; there have been times when the first time I've watched a film I wasn't receptive and subsequent viewings improved my opinion.) But every film has either not impressed me that much or I couldn't overlook the (sometimes singular) flaw(s) enough that I would say any of them deserved four stars.

Part of me worried I was becoming too cynical, and now the reverse has happened: I saw Hugo today, I loved it, and I'll give it four stars in my imaginary newspaper review.

But... While I enjoyed it, while I loved its wonder and infatuation with film as a medium, it is a bit breezy. It's not what I would call weightless, but the drama is light and the supporting threads are like airy padding that almost force whimsy. I don't agree with Tasha Robinson's comments, but I fully understand where she's coming from. Yet, I forgive the flaws because the film has heart and a genuine sense of wonder. That's the important part, that the film isn't cynical. It may be the least-Sorcese film Scorcese has made since The Last Temptation of Christ, but his love of the material comes through even if you're unfamiliar with his personal history or advocacy for film preservation.

But part of me wonders if I'm being too kind to it. To eager to rate it highly.

***

The lack of cynicism also helps makes The Muppets enjoyable. It's even more by-the-numbers than Hugo, and fully aware and up-front about it, but it also lays out that this kind of almost-old-fashioned humor still has a place and is worth preserving.

Not to reference the AV Club too much, but I do agree that the film is a bit too nostalgic for its own good. Fond memories of the Muppets is fine, but as Phipps says, it's time to create new memories to feel nostalgic over.

It's a fun film, though, with some real humor. I don't have much else to say about it.

Book 73: War is Boring

2011-12-14T21:05:00.003-06:00

War is Boring by David Axe and Matt Bors (B+)

Over the past few years David Axe has gone into several different war zones; nominally as a war correspondent, but not all of the conflicts attract the attention of American news outlets. It's really because, like Jeremy Renner's character in The Hurt Locker, Axe is almost addicted to the highs and lows of warzones, the long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of intensity. No real answer is given as to what spurs Axe on. Even he doesn't pretend to know, and in the end there is no resolution. Combined with the book's brevity, it feels less like a complete story than a profile.

The book doesn't take a big picture approach; it is focused on Axe's own perspective, so there's little history given as to the root of the violence in each area beyond rebelling against colonialism or religious strife. Because the book is slim and can be read so quickly there is the problem that the different areas blur together. I'm not saying history lessons should have been included, but there aren't many other indicators to differentiate each country in the writing or art.

I should also mention that the book doesn't try to use Axe's experiences or "addiction" to take a larger view of American military endeavors, the military industrial complex, or other related issues. There's no editorializing, surprisingly enough.

Still, for its shortness it is an engaging read.

Books 71-72: Yet more Bleach

2011-12-09T21:03:00.002-06:00

Bleach vol. 36, 37 by Tite Kubo (B+)

I bought volume 36 when it came out a few months ago, but I held off on reviewing it until now because it set up the first part of a flashback story finished in volume 37.

Except the bulk of the flashback was in volume 36, with only a minor revelation (minor in that it doesn't affect the the main present-day storyline, and because it's not that surprising given what we know of the main villain and his abilities) and then something of a postscript that didn't tell us anything we couldn't have guessed.

And then it's back to where volume 34 left off, with two groups of fighters assembled and the first pairing off of them (four sets of one on one in this case). The nice thing here is that the first fight is finished by the end of the volume, so hopefully the other three will be completed in volume 38 because as much as I like big fight sequences, introducing new characters and running through the "Let me show you each of my powers/power levels in turn" gets too repetitive even for me.

The one standout moment from this is that the biggest villains are temporarily neutralized right at the start, leaving the "lesser" Espadas to fight the Soul Reapers. One of the Espadas immediately works out the Soul Reaper's real plan for containing them and starts giving orders, assuming the field leader command for himself. I found it interesting because so far none of the Espadas (save Grimmjow and Ulquiorra, the two recurring ones) have been given much characterization. I'm not sure if I would reach this conclusion if I didn't already know it from the TV Tropes page, but I do know that this Espada, Barragan, hopes to overthrow Aizen for personal reasons. It sets him apart from the others, and as long as it lasts it will be interesting to watch.

So, in short, the plot has moved forward to the next round of one on one fights with magic swords and ever-more-ultimate attacks. I may make it sound repetitive, but I enjoy it.

It's more a case of I love the general feel of the series. I love individual characters, I love the "rules" of this universe, I love the "magic swords" (I wonder why I'm avoiding using the esoteric, in-universe terms; no one is actually reading this), I enjoy how the fights play out (even if they're predictable)... I think this is how any series attracts fans, it's always the broadstrokes of the universe and characters that draw people in more than a consistent quality of the stories. Superman doesn't last because every issue of Action Comics is solid, but because the character endures.

Don't know why I went into that. I think it's because lately I've been considering how I have been less than enthused with how series 5 and 6 of Doctor Who had upfront, series-long story arcs (compared to how Russell T. Davies would just have an arcword or term appearing in several episodes as a tease before the big finale of each series). I've just heard (catching up on stuff) that the next series will not have a big storyline but will just be Monster of the Week ones, which I welcome, but I've considered that my opinion of the past two series hasn't been diminished by the big storyline and I still love the series because of what it is at heart.

Anyway, I think I've rambled enough.

The Year in Crazy Part 93

2011-12-07T22:10:00.003-06:00

Back during the Bush II years the increasingly smaller and smaller band of die-hard loyalists to the President used the term 'Bush Derangement Syndrome' to dismiss criticism of said President as being grounded not in logic or reason but in a personal, perhaps not even understood, fear and hatred of the man himself. From The Other Wiki (the one I use the second-most) we learn that it was coined in 2003, when Bush was still riding high in the polls on the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War was still in its early 'We're about to hand over control and pull out any day now' period of self-deception. People didn't have much patience for those questioning Dear Leader, and liberals were consistently, vehemently shouted down, if not outright ignored.*

But as time went on, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued on with no end in sight, Hurricane Katrina came and flooded New Orleans, the GOP overreached with the Terry Schiavo matter and our international standing deteriorated (and, later still, as the current economic crisis began to settle in) more and more people turned against Bush and the BDS argument became harder to use as a way of handwaving people criticizing the President because it turned out more and more (and eventually most) people agreed with said criticisms.

Why am I mentioning all this now? Because back in the 2008 primaries, when it became apparent that Barack Obama was going to become the Democratic candidate, Obama Derangement Syndrome set in. Even before it was clear he was going to win, even before he was the official nominee, Republicans were working themselves up over Jeremiah Wright and Saul Alinsky and he's a secret Muslim!

Am I being hypocritical, dismissing the Bush DS while accepting the Obama DS as legitimate? A little, maybe. The thing is, and the media (with its hard-on for "objectivism") and the Right ignore this completely, the thing is the people on the Left who are way out there - the 9/11 Truthers or the people who see no line being crossed in comparing Bush to Hitler - are maligned within the left wing. They don't speak for us, we don't listen to them, they're off in their own little world.

But the Birthers? The people convinced Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim? They have sway with the Right. They're not marginalized.

Case in point:

What are President Obama’s kids eating at school on Pearl Harbor day? Japanese food, of course!
Sidwell Friends School’s website shows the menu for Wednesday December 7th, 2011, the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, as an Asian food day.
[...]
It was the bloodiest foreign attack on U.S. soil in the modern war era, until the September 11th attacks in 2001.
Here are the options for Malia Obama and her sister, Sasha on the “Day that will live in Infamy: December 7, 2011.
Asian Mushroom Soup
Oriental Noodle Salad
Classic Spinach Salad
Teriyaki Marinated Chicken Strips
Szechuan Tofu and Veggies
Garlic Roasted Edamame
Vegetable Fried Rice
Fortune Cookies
This is so clearly a plot to make kowtowing to the yellow menace part of the crimes of the Obama administration, which obviously isn't satisfied with spreading secret Kenyan philosophy across the land, but wants the Pledge of Allegiance replaced by "Tora! Tora! Tora!" The school explained that its lunch contractor said it randomly rotates the menu and it was mere coincidence that today's turned up Asian. There's a horror-show conspiracy-theorizing thread about this at Free Republic which I. am. not. going. to. link.

This apparently broke big when convicted felon-cum-far right pundit/Fear Factor contestant (yes, really) G. Gordon Liddy tweeted about it.

And here's the other major difference between BDS and OBS: the people attacking Bush were attacking him on his policies, on what he actually said and did. The Iraq War was not a massive hallucination that the Left dreamed up. It happened. I was deployed there myself, saw it with my own eyes, yada yada. It wasn't made up by the Left so they would have an excuse to attack Bush.

Compare that to Fox News getting worked up over Obama not mentioning God at Thanksgiving (except he did) or Sarah Palin thinking that Michelle Obama is going to take away your cookies. This is asinine batshit. This can only tangentially be tied to Obama through seven or eight degrees of separation. I can't say it better than Meteor Blades did:

This time they used the Obama daughters to run their little smear. Even the Mafia once had rules against that. But then the Mafia had more ethics than these guys.

But on the plus side, another difference between BDS and ODS is that using the term 'BDS' went out of style because Bush became drastically unpopular as his administration went on. But Obama's still popular, and even the RNC realizes attacking him may backfire.

*I recently watched Studio 60 for inspiration for my NaNoWriMo novel, and there was a part towards the end of the show's sole season based during the days and weeks immediately after 9/11. I won't (can't) recount the entire conversation, but there's a point where the network executive is talking to the writer and producer of the show, and he tells them they can't do anything that puts America or Bush in a bad light. Not at all. It's all off-limits because America is united behind Bush and they can't rock the boat.

"But feel free to make fun of Hollywood," he tells them.

"But we're Americans," one counters.

"No you're not." The executive answers.

As much as I hated seeing adults and presumably rational people react to 9/11 by blindly following our political leaders and accepting whatever bullshit was spouted on the news (They hate us for our freedoms), what I hate(d) even more was seeing how one large swath of America, the liberals/progressive/true Left, was elevated (lowered?) to a second-tier status behind the terrorists as being anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-troops. This is a very small blessing, but this country did not go so far as to repeat the HUAC hearings or require people to take loyalty oaths or swear fealty to the Republican party. But we got close, in those days. It was so easy, almost expected, to call out Democrats and Hollywood people and liberals in general as being in league with the terrorists.

And it still is, in some circles. But I've gone off on this tangent long enough.

The Year in Crazy Part 92

2011-12-06T10:10:00.004-06:00

It was a nice month ignoring politics (for the most part), but I'm back to noticing bullshit like this:

Last Friday, during an event at Harvard, Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich offered up a modest plan for alleviating poverty in the United States. It was time, he said, to relax our "truly stupid" child labor laws. In particular, schools should fire their unionized janitors, and hire children as young as nine to do the work instead.

One thing I've learned from anime and manga is that in Japan school children will end the school day (week?) cleaning up their homeroom. Sweep the floor, wash the windows, that sort of thing. The sense I get from that is it's in line with Japan taking their education programs more seriously than America does and it's about instilling good habits in the students. It is not about saving money on janitors and using the children as cheap labor. I may be wrong on this, but I'm assuming that Japanese schools have regular adult janitors in their employ to carry the load of keeping the grounds neat. Again, I may be wrong.

So on the surface this isn't a stupid idea. A little cleaning work wouldn't cripple any kids and, as I said, it's a good habit to learn. But where Gingrinch is coming from is the idea of cheap labor, and the idea of blaming "really poor children in really poor neighborhoods" (which Slacktivist points out just barely counts as a racial code-word) for being poor, and thus being lazy. He's proposing something that makes a little sense for all the wrong reasons and is insulting, vacuous and ridiculous as all get out in doing so.

So of course he's the current gOP Flavor of the Month.

Really, how, in the second decade of the 21st century, is our national conversation even entertaining the idea of child labor laws as being questionable? What the fuck is wrong with us?

Stupid in Print

2011-12-06T09:40:00.002-06:00

At work last night, gathering copies of new releases, I saw this:

First off, am I the only one that looks at Trump's expression and thinks 'Poser'? That he's trying so hard to look tough but he'll flinch if you simply raised your voice?

Second, look at the description from the back cover:

President Obama has been a disaster for America. In four short years, he’s wrecked our economy, saddled our children with more debt than America managed to rack up in 225 years, and gone around the world apologizing for our country—as if the greatest nation in the world needs to apologize for being a land of opportunity and freedom, which we were before Obama became president.

That's why I'm running for Presi- Oh, wait.

Now, America looks like a broken country—stripped of jobs, stripped of wealth, stripped of respect. And what does President Obama do about it? He plays nice with a China that is doing everything it can to destroy our economy,

As opposed to the other China, the one who knows we're in debt to them so bad that if we tank we take them with us.

while refusing to stand up for America with Middle Eastern oil mobsters who think they can hold us hostage through higher prices at the pump,

Don't tell the Tea Party, but I think Trump is coming out in favor of alternative energy.

and chucking billions in “stimulus” money to his friends and supporters while letting the rest of us foot the bill.

Trump, you're in the top 1%, you're not paying any taxes. Hell, you won't even pay off your own debts, you'll come up with bullshit lawsuits about how your image has been damaged and how you're the real victim whenever something bad happens. You're a whiny baby with no sense of personal responsibility. Just go fuck yourself.

And you couldn't even get your book out in time to coincide with your fleeting front-runner status, when people may have actually been willing to put up money for your stupid ravings. Seriously, your ghostwriter dropped the ball on this. Hope you fired them.

Tron: Legacy and Tree of Life

2011-12-03T19:11:00.002-06:00

I tried writing a post earlier today and lost my train of thought. Let's try again.

I realized I never reviewed Tron: Legacy, even though I saw it twice when it was in the theater (always a good sign). My response at the time was an underwhelmed shrug. I loved the visual look and the soundtrack, but the parts never came close to becoming a whole. There were hints of larger ideas thrown about (biodigital jazz, man) but they were never explained. Not even halfway. (OLIVIA WILDE: Okay seriously, what the fuck am I even made of now?)

But overall the movie is a nice diversion, never really boring even as it goes through the simplistic story (two hours that boil down to just a couple people trying to get from Point A to Point B). It's rewatchable, which is a very important but perennially ignored criterion. Highly rewatchable, actually. During the past month with NaNoWriMo I had it playing in the background I don't know how many times via Netflix Instant, which helped raise the movie's value in my eyes.

One thing about it that stood out is how Kevin Flynn's motivation until the third act comes from the more meditative, patient ideas of Eastern religions than the action-propelled mindset of Western religions (in other words, for presenting passivity as a possibility instead of leaping straight toward aggressiveness). This isn't the first movie to try to work Eastern philosophy into a character or the plot, and it's never going to be the most recognizable attempt. But like the Matrix movies it does deserve notice for avoiding what Cornel West dismissively calls 'Exotic Amusement,' treating those strange Oriental ideas as part-hippie-esque bullshit and part-mystical profundity that transforms a person into a martial arts wizard who can run up walls and jump across chasms.

Because it's always about kung fu and karate with Hollywood, isn't it? That's really all that Asia is good for in their eyes, serving as this mysterious Other-land where everyone knows martial arts and their religions are thinking about nothing so they can do even more impressive/impossible feats of martial arts. So I do give some respect to the Wachowski Brothers and the makers of Tron: Legacy for using the Far East as something more than an explanation for how a person can run along treetops.

***

I watched The Tree of Life last night, with almost impossibly high hopes. I've said time and again that 2011 has not given me a four-star film, and even more than Drive this was a film that got across-the-board accolades and had me excited about it.

And then I watched it, and no. I can't give it four stars. There are two parts to it that simply did not work for me and they were so at odds with the rest of the film that I can't ignore their flaws (because I don't expect a film to be perfect for me to give it a high rating; just good enough that the flaws don't detract from the rest of it).

First of all, the dinosaurs. This part, most likely, is why Ebert and the AV Club (among others) have invoked 2001: A Space Odyssey when talking about this film. You get a grand view of time in both films, showing just how small and insignificant the human characters ultimately are in the grand scheme.

Yet why did we see the dinosaurs? Just as part of the truncated history of existence, from the Big Bang to the 1950s? Then why skip over everything after the asteroid crash and all of human history up until the 1950s? Don't get me wrong, I loved everything from the Big Bang to the creation of the world and up until we see that first dinosaur. But once we see the dinosaurs, once we see them "doing" things, then questions arise, such as "What's their story?" "What are they doing, and how does this fit into the rest of the film?"

The answer is nothing. It's distracting. In 2001, the Dawn of Man sequence has a point. We see our ancestors begin to use tools, and the Monoliths are objects/motifs that unite the past and future sequences and tie the story together. Here, the dinosaurs are a detour that serve no purpose.

And then there's the finale, the Gainax ending on the beach and desert and wherever else. I didn't mind the sequence at first, but it went on too long until it became self-indulgent and (more unforgivable) boring.

I don't want to sit here and say what I would have done if I was telling the story, but I will say that if the dinosaurs had been cut and the finale trimmed I would probably have a much greater appreciation for the film.

Because the bulk of the film, the 1950s stuff with Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, is solid gold. The reviews tried to pigeonhole this thread by saying that Pitt is a disciplinarian and Chastian is too permissive or good, but I didn't see that. The characters are all three-dimensional and very real, and the movie's non-linear(?) jumping around in time paints them and the family as much more multi-faceted than you tend to see in fiction. Yes, Pitt is a hardass, but he's not strict for the sake of being strict or abusive for the sake of being abusive.

Really, if the film has been just the 1950s stuff (I don't think Sean Penn's scenes added anything) with some of the scenery porn and birth of the universe stuff thrown in, I might have given this four stars. As it is, it's too flabby in certain spots.

NaNoWriMo again: Day 30 Report

2011-11-30T10:36:00.000-06:00

Words needed: 50,000
Words written: 50,019

Sunday night my laptop semi-froze (it's this problem where the touchpad stops working, even though the keyboard still works; rebooting always fixes it) and I stopped work at that point. Short of the needed 1,667 words for the day, but I was still on pace. Then Monday I lost most of the day to constructing a TV stand and doing some rearrangement in my room. I still got past the daily word count, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that over the past couple days I had hit an area in the book where I didn't know where I wanted to go.

I mentioned last time I had come up with an idea to serve as a theme for the book, but it will require some research (not to mention reappraising what I've already written). I tried to push ahead to hit 50K, but I knew that when November ended I'd have to hit pause and step back. I wondered if I should have even worked to make it to 50K, but I had several ideas I wanted to get down (even if they were somewhat random) and that put me over. Hell, I still have the third act of the book to figure out and actually write.

So once again I've made it to the end of the month, but once again I'm nowhere near finished. It's no trick for me to write a lot; the trick is to see if I can finish anything.

NaNoWriMo again: Day 25 Report

2011-11-25T23:55:00.005-06:00

Words Needed: 41,675 words.
Words Written: 41,123 words.

I'm ahead of schedule still, but I'm at the point where I'm not so happy with my idea, I'm not sure what the hell I'm doing, etc. Second doubts most of the way, which is better than my usual 'second doubts all the way' problem at this point.

Right now I'm just throwing in new story ideas that make this less a cohesive narrative and more a series of issues for the main character to deal with happening one after another. Maybe I'm being hard on myself, but this close to the finish line, the point when I can stop writing for a day or two (which turns into a week, two weeks, a month, etc.), I wish I wasn't facing the same problem I always have of losing my enthusiasm and motivation.

One possible saving grace is that yesterday I came up with an idea that brings a whole new angle to book as a whole, especially on the thematic level. The downside there is I need to do some research on Buddhism. Which I know nothing about. That may upset my momentum, but it may also give me some solid ideas about the character's arc (which I've been letting develop at its own pace).

Really, I'm no longer concerned about November. I'm worried about December.

NaNoWriMo again: Day 17 report

2011-11-21T08:38:00.002-06:00

Words needed: 28,339
Words written: 29,436

OK, I'm a couple days late again. I'd blame work, but since I worked the last holiday season I knew this was coming. I'm just glad to have more hours.

And it's not like I'm unable to get into the writing mode when I get off work. Actually, over the past week I was able to get my writing done before I even went to work, which was really nice. Then yesterday I started work in the morning and that threw everything off.

But I'm ahead of schedule, as I usually am (once I get writing it's often easy to reach the daily 1,667 count and push on further). Not that that means I'm making headway in the story itself. I mentioned last time that I'm writing about the production of a TV show's third season from the perspective of the head writer (there aren't going to be any bits about actors flubbing lines or endless retakes). I said I didn't want to just tell the reader that the first season was good and the second season not-so-good, so what I did was I went back and wrote a pretty lengthy prologue chronicling the creation of the show and its first two seasons in trade publication headlines, articles, interviews, and online episode reviews that convey the rise and fall of the show. It made more work for myself, and it took about a week or so, which means that I'm still trying to get out of Act I and into Act II. I'm still setting up some plot threads and trying to think of new and interesting takes on tropes about Executive Meddling and the like.

But it's not all bad. One of the minor characters has pushed himself to the forefront by doing something unexpected, so I hope to get some mileage out of that.

Really, all I can do is keep plugging away and see where this takes me. After doing this three other times I'm not concerned about hitting 50K by next Wednesday; what worries me is if I'll keep writing when December hits.

NaNoWriMo again: Day 4 report

2011-11-04T21:22:00.003-05:00

Words Needed: 6,668
Words Written: 7,020

Fourth attempt at NaNoWriMo. I am well aware of my faults with writing and making time to write and focusing on writing when I am, and all I can hope is that awareness of my shortcomings will make it possible to overcome them. That's been on my mind quite a bit lately, being aware of my faults and trying to change things. I'm not the best at self-improvement, I know.

Anywho, I'm on track so far. Got a bit of a headstart, but compared to my being in the 8,500 word range at this point the last two times I've done it, I'm a little behind. The problem isn't my story idea; I like the general idea and I have a couple different subplots already in motion, with more likely to come because of the general setting (the production of the third season of a TV show, from the perspective of the creator/head writer trying to steer it away from sitcom towards the dramedy he originally envisioned it to be).

The real problem is that this is a book about a TV show, so I have to come up with things like characters and storylines and eventually bits of script for the show within the book, in addition to the actual characters and storylines of the book itself. This is something new to me, even if I hadn't made this even worse by making the show a dramedy instead of either just a drama (which I think I could pull off) or a comedy. That is what I'm really worried about: having to write pieces of comedy that work and don't work, and making them good or bad enough on their own that the reader will understand why they do or don't work (from the main character's perspective, at the very least) without spoonfeeding anything.

I could easily skim over all that, just have the characters talk about how a scene isn't working or how some rewrites need to be done, but that would all just fall into the Informed Flaw, Informed Attribute, Informed Ability models, which are all no-nos (Show, Don't Tell). So I'm going to have to make time depict the writers writing, coming up with different gags or making slight adjustments to them. Which not only seems like it will become tedious for the reader, but strikes me as it will require more time to write than the straight prose scenes.

So I'm thinking I'll just have to make notes to myself while writing. "Scene of Thad and other writer going over a scene goes here." Then I can come back to them later, or work on those scenes separately as I'm writing the main story.

Seems like more work for myself, but I like this idea enough that I want to try and see it through.

***

Other than the hurdles I've made for myself with the story itself, I've had trouble the past couple days with writing just due to a general funk. Nothing is causing it (I don't believe I'm affected by SAD), it's just something that happens to me once in a while.

I'm not having as much trouble with being distracted by Internet stuff. I've turned off Tweetdeck and I'm ignoring most stuff on Google Reader, especially political stuff.

So hopefully I can get through this funk and get deeper into the book.

The Year in Crazy Part 91

2011-10-30T18:31:00.002-05:00

With Occupy Wall Street still dominating all the media outlets I follow there hasn't been much to talk about lately. The Right has been doing what they can to vilify or undermine the movement, but it's all following the expected beats. In fact, politics in general have lately been falling into established plotlines (Obama proposes a half-measure, Republicans stonewall, people react as they always do) and I've found myself getting tired of politics entirely. It's like watching a dozen works of a particular genre and then recognizing every twist and turn of subsequent works.

I'm actually glad NaNoWriMo is coming up again, and with the holidays a break in Congress. A few weeks where I can ignore any political news, either by keeping busy or because nothing else will be happening.

But in the meanwhile, here's something disgusting:

Rush Limbaugh is nothing if not stubborn. He’s now obstinately resisting an international outcry over his incendiary comments about Africa’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

This band of child-abductors, rapists and killers is acknowledged as bad news by pretty much everyone. Everyone, that is, except for Limbaugh, who took to the air shortly after President Obama announced he was dispatching 100 military advisers to help take them on.
“Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you? You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.”

Why did Limbaugh decide to defend the LRA when he apparently had never heard of them? Did he really hear the word 'Lord' in their name and say to himself "Well, they must be Christian."?

No. He saw that Barack Obama was doing something and his impulse was to take the opposing view. It's beyond cliched at this point to say that conservatives are motivated by nothing more than standing against Obama on any- and everything. So committed are they that even with this story broken and those of us unfamiliar with the LRA having learned who they are and what they do, Limbaugh refuses to apologize or retract his remarks. Or maybe Limbaugh just has some ingrained psychological aversion to admitting he's wrong, I don't know.

Torchwood: Miracle Day

2011-10-19T20:48:00.000-05:00

I'm hoping this doesn't become an ongoing thing for me, but I have to mention again that I've been feeling cynical lately, especially when it comes entertainment. Too ready to point out the flaws or missed opportunities and not just let myself get into the story. This has come up again with Miracle Day, the fourth series of Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, even when I should have known better. The first two series of Torchwood were uneven, though with signs of improvement in series two (I admired the 'Owen dies and comes back' story; it was unique and they followed it up well), and then Children of Earth... If you want to make a list of the best television work in the past decade or so, Children of Earth should definitely be mentioned. It took the "Doctor Who, but darker" idea as far as it could without going overboard. It was brutal but gripping.

Which should have been something of a good sign for Miracle Day. It would be one storyline stretched out over multiple episodes, but only as a limited series. Not even a full 13 episodes like the series one and two.

Unfortunately, I think Miracle Day would have improved a lot if it had been longer. 13 episodes, 15, maybe 20. The problem is that the premise - all of the sudden no one is dying - was too big for just 10 episodes. At least, the way it was presented here. I can understand the idea of focusing the series on the Torchwood members (and the people brought into their circle) instead of expanding the focus globally, but the writers went too far in ignoring the global ramifications of Miracle Day. Like World War Z, like a couple chapters of The Stand which turned attention away from the main characters, filling in the world of the show would have gone a long way to giving weight to what was happening. Instead, we're shown a handful of characters dealing with a mystery and running from the CIA (for most of the series) as if the situation was only affecting them.

There is an attempt in the character of Oswald Danes, a pedophile/rapist/murderer whose failed execution kicks off the series, but like the series as a whole whatever promise his story thread started out with was wasted over time with bad story turns or unrealized potential. His attempt to plead forgiveness from the public goes too fast to be believable, and then his apparent role as messiah/prophet gets ignored for a couple episodes, and ultimately a character who's introduced as a psychotic genius is reduced to a plot device to help the story get through Act III. It's not just that his character isn't developed consistently, but his potential as a perspective on the Miracle apart from what the Torchwood team is doing was never realized.

It would have been easy having the characters listen to radio broadcasts or watching cable news, and in the first couple episodes there's scenes where characters discuss India wanting to reconcile with Pakistan (a result of the idea of reincarnation being invalidated) or the like, but that tapers off quickly and by episode four we see people walking around Venice Beach as if nothing is going on. The 'Soulless,' people walking the streets in genuinely creepy masks, disappear by the same point.

And then what we do have with the story is rushed or implied more often than developed and shown. The introduction of the 'overflow camps' was well-paced at first (even though the word 'camps' should have sent warning bells ringing in the minds of anyone with elementary knowledge of World War II), but we see nothing of how society at large comes to accept the mass immolations of people who should already be dead. It's a pretty big leap to go from confusion and awe (as people should have been feeling at first) to outright terror and an acceptance of death camps for the sake of stability, with many gradations between the two points. How did everyone leap from one point to the other? We don't see the runs on grocery stores or banks (though we're told stocks start falling and the world enters an economic depression), we don't see riots, we only see overcrowding at the hospitals in the first couple episodes.

A longer series, preferably with more character threads unrelated to each other, could have met the potential of the idea of Miracle Day. Much less rushing, much less telling instead of showing, much less glossing over how the different parts of society (financial, political, media) react to the death of death.

But the problems with Miracle Day aren't just limited to the series being too short. Even within the Torchwood story there's unearned moments like Rex, out of nowhere, exposing (most of) the moles in the CIA or a broadly painted look at creeping fascism devoid of nuance or any new ideas. Or things coming out of left field, like Jilly going from enigmatic in episodes two and three to frustrated and overworked in episode four.

But really, I think the best way to describe the flaws of Miracle Day is to compare it to the worst aspects of 24. There's a series of not-so-much red herrings as "The presumed villain has a higher-up," a series of lesser antagonists who get eliminated after an episode or two, and most egregiously there's a moment when one of the good guys is revealed to be a mole. I literally thought to myself "Just like 24" when that scene played.

Except Miracle Day wasn't 24 episodes of real-time events. The padding and the nonsensical turns for the sake of cliffhangers isn't anywhere near as defensible as it is with 24. The series was too short for forgotten storylines (remember Phicorp wanting to sell more drugs over the counter?) or go-nowhere pathos like Esther's sister's mental breakdown.

It's really disappointing how good the first episode was, yet how quickly it devolved into episodes of wheel-spinning and then a cliffhanger. Just in episode three, with the Torchwood team on the run and unsure where to begin, we have half the team splitting up because Rex gets frustrated with them and Jack spotted a gay bar (seriously, he sees a gay bar and he basically says "Eh, nothing important is happening." On that subject, we're told Jack is omnisexual yet I can't remember him hooking up with any women; it's always guys). Then, of course, they come back together at the end just in time for something exciting (or mildly interesting) to happen, holding off on any real revelations until the last couple episodes.

Wasted potential. Very disappointing.

NaNoWriMo is coming

2011-10-17T09:36:00.003-05:00

Two weeks to Halloween, which has put me in the mood for zombie movies and other horror tales. But then after that is November, which means NaNoWriMo. Trying to write about 1,667 words a day to come up with a novel (or part of one) by month's end.

The past two years I've come up with an idea before November started, but not an outline or anything sufficient to carry me past the end of November. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I always end up writing scenes where the characters talk about what's happened and what they know, and they drone on about what to do next or what might be going on. Things don't happen, I lose momentum with writing, and then I lose interest in my story.

Same thing happened this past July and early August when I tried doing the NaNoWriMo summer camp. I'm happier with the overall story idea I had, but that didn't stop me from losing interest like times previous. Real life gets in the way, which for me means Internet life. Trying to keep up with Google Reader, Twitter, and daily stuff like Gaia or morning emails at the very least create the illusion that I'm burning a lot of time each day. Plus I have my own bad habits, like watching movies or TV shows I've seen plenty of times before when I could be writing or checking out something new. I have no shortage of new books, magazines and podcasts to enjoy. If I'm not going to write I could at least be doing something new.

I have been doing some writing the past couple weeks, just Rule 34 stuff like I mentioned a while back. I still have a couple other stories in that mode in the works, but not things that will take too long. Given my work schedule this week I could conceivably finish both within about a week. Or less. Depends on how much time I devote to Internet stuff and whatever else. After that, I should by all rights be able to focus on something longer and less fetish-y.

But what? I'm thinking of going back to my summer project. I have a general idea of how the story is supposed to play out, but I have a lot of changes in mind for what I've already written. I don't know if it'd be cheating or not, and frankly I don't care. I'd much rather get that project going again and finish it (even just a first draft) than get 50,000 words of new stuff (a jumble of some meat and a lot of fat to later trim) like I've done in the past.

One concern is that with the holiday season approaching I'll be getting more hours (dear God I hope I'll be getting more hours). Less free time to write or do anything else. I might go Twitter dark again, or make some serious cut to my follow list (which I always threaten but never do), or more likely just ignore all political news for a while. Nothing has happened since the Republicans took back the House and I damn well don't expect anything to happen during the doldrums of fall turning into winte- OH WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT!

I would feel guilty about ignoring what's happening with Occupy Wall Street, but I'll be honest: I'm too cynical to expect this to go anywhere. When the weather gets worse the crowds will thin, and when the holidays come out how many people will want to stand in the cold instead of visiting friends and family? That's what the cynic in me feels, those in power just have to wait out the protestors.

So why don't I get selfish and focus on my own things? I'm not naive enough to believe writing a book will propel me to fiscal security (if not outrageous fame as well), or that if I even get a book written it will be bought by any publisher. But while it's harder than just rewatching movies or rereading comics, it is more satisfying to have done something fresh.

The Year in Crazy Part 90

2011-10-12T18:16:00.004-05:00

There are some things I can never take seriously: reality TV stars, people willing to go on daytime shows like Maury Povich or Judge Judy, and especially people who rail against the government, as a complete entity, as being thoroughly tyrannical, bureaucratic, inefficient and above all evil. Anybody who takes the position that government is completely evil, or even just mostly evil, is full of shit and they know it. Every Republican that speaks out against taxes and regulations and blames all problems on the government knows damn well their precious defense spending can't happen without taxes, just to name a major example. Or on a smaller level, think of allllllllll the pork projects and special favors for their constituents they secure each year.

I would have so much respect for any Republican that came out and said "I only want smaller government in that I want everything that doesn't benefit me directly to be eliminated." Because that's the truth. Everybody has a complaint about how the government is run and what programs or agencies receive funding. Liberals don't want corporate welfare and a bloated and unnecessary defense budget, and conservatives don't want regular welfare or funding for Planned Parenthood. There is a disparity is how much money is spent on each side's pet peeves, but that's beside the point right now.

My point is that for all their posturing, Republicans don't want to shrink the government in any meaningful way. Trimming a fraction of a percent here or there on easily demonized programs is an easy bone to throw their base, but when it comes to the big three things - Defense, Medicare and Social Security - most are only ever going to pay lip service to the idea of someday, at some point, maybe thinking about instituting a little cut that won't go into effect for 20 or 30 years. Fiscal Conservative is as much a character to play as Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Frankenstein are. Say the lines, hit the notes, and then move on.

Except over the past couple years there have been people who actually, legitimately want to just burn down the entire government and to hell with paying for the military or repairing our infrastructure or paying police and firemen. I don't know if these people have actually thought through what would happen if they brought the economy past the brink, what would happen if the federal government stopped working and paychecks to federal employees stopped going out, if states didn't receive federal funds, if this or that or the other. Are they actually insane, nihilistic zealots? I have to assume so, because otherwise things would never get to the point that we'd see stories like this

The Topeka City Council on Tuesday voted to repeal the city’s law against misdemeanor domestic battery, the latest in a budget battle that has freed about 30 abuse suspects from charges.

One of the offenders was even arrested and released twice since the brouhaha broke out Sept. 8.

It started when Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor announced that a 10 percent budget cut would force him to end his office’s prosecution of misdemeanor cases, almost half of which last year were domestic battery cases.

Everytime I see a conservative or libertarian whine about how unfair taxes are and how big and evil the government is, I want them to explain how the police and fire departments and military (even if just a standing military ready to defend our borders) are supposed to be funded without taxation.

And then I worry that they'll say something about "the free market," as if public safety and national defense should be run as for-profit businesses.

Cars 2

2011-10-10T23:04:00.003-05:00

It's not that I avoided seeing Cars 2, it's just that my finances took a hit after I got back from Disneyworld so I couldn't see it when it was in the first-run theaters, and then it's hung around at a second-run theater but I couldn't get worked up enough to set aside time to see it. But today circumstances led me near the theater and when I checked the showtimes wouldn't you know it? It was getting ready to start. So I saw it.

Overall it was as underwhelming as I expected. It was, as the critics said, The Mater Show, but in fairness the spy story at the center of the film was given full due. Not that that should be taken as a rave, at least not from me. I've always been more a fan of the idea of James Bond and other secret agents than I am their actual movies, and Cars 2 plays more serious than satire with the material.

Still, seeing some spy-cars try to solve an international mystery was more entertaining than the heavy-handed 'message' pieces, with Lightning learning to accept Mater for who he is while, conversely, Mater learns that others see him as a fool and he needs to, I don't know, become smart? His problem isn't immaturity so much as it is simple-mindedness, so I'm not sure what growth he was supposed to experience. Example, the wasabi scene. He doesn't know what wasabi is, he eats a giant mouthful, people laugh at him. It's not that he went overboard with the wasabi to showboat or anything, he was just ignorant. Other than learning from his mistake, what was he supposed to do?

I was really hoping the film wouldn't be as bad (or rather, as bland) as it turned out to be. The first Cars was a knock on Pixar's streak, but it still had heart and a genuine message that isn't found in a billion other pieces of for-the-kids entertainment. Cars 2 replaced the heart with a lot of yelling and silliness, and while none of it is executed badly, it's all so by-the-numbers and unchallenging that it really isn't worthy of Pixar. I understand why this got a sequel sooner than Monsters Inc. (though that one is coming): billions of dollars of merchandise. And fine, complaining about Hollywood being run on money is like complaining about ice in Antarctica. But Pixar never played it so damn safe before, almost (dare I say it) phoning it in.

But that's all problems with the writing. The animation and design itself is gorgeous. Just gorgeous, especially the Toyko and Rome scenes. The writers may not have pushed themselves here, but the animation crew must have been trying to carry the film by themselves, because their work was just spectacular.

But now I come to the thing about Cars 2 that... really, I don't know how to lead into it, so let me just say it:

THIS WORLD MAKES NO SENSE!

Anthropomorphic cars didn't make sense in the first film. Anthropomorphic cars with a society that mirrors our own definitely didn't make sense. But the story was good enough that you were carried along for the ride and didn't stop to question the fact that the cars have tongues. Or phones. Or militaries (one of the Radiator Springs locals was a sergeant (of some level; I didn't get a close look). Or newspapers.

But the story in Cars 2 is a trifle, and every now and then I'd be losing focus on the story and I'd notice, say, flowerbeds on windowsills. Just like we humans have. Except... why are cars gardening? For aesthetic reasons? OK. But those windows looked a bit thin considering how wide most cars are. And why would they have little flowerbeds on second story windows? When your appendages are big fat tires, how delicately can you work? How did they plant those flowers in that little flowerbox with tires for hands?

And then there's the wasabi. I thought all the cars ate was gasoline (which is (also?) pumped into their tanks like normal cars). Why would they have spices or condiments or things like wasabi? More importantly WHY DO THEY HAVE TONGUES? How do you evolve a living mechanical creature with a big pink tongue? Why does it have taste buds? To know if the oil has gone bad?

And what about the sentient boats and trains? In the Rome sequence we see some rich cars watching the race from their (sentient) boats. Do they own the boats? Is this slavery?

And the plot revolves around the lemons of the car world trying to undermine a new fuel source to get rich, but how is it their society 'developed' these lemons in the first place? Wait, Holly Shiftwell's information on the Gremlins etc. listed the years of their manufacture, didn't it? Is that according to our calendar?

BECAUSE there's a part early in the film when a character mentions the dinosaurs. WHAT DINOSAURS? Were they mechanical Truckasaurus-type creatures made of metal? Then how did they turn into oil? Or is it that this world is a post-apocalyptic future, after mankind has gone extinct and the machines have risen up to replace us, mimicking our cultures and societies out of, I don't know, fondness for their creators? It would explain why the cars have a Tokyo and Rome and London that almost perfectly mirror our own cities.

That's actually something about Cars 2 that disappointed me. It's that stupid type of humor lesser animated films do, where they take something that doesn't talk (like fish, or in this case cars) and they not only have them talk, but they have them living in an entire world that mirrors our own, only all the brand names and celebrities are terrible puns. Watch Shark Tale (if you can stomach it) to see what I'm talking about. Every image of the underwater fish city has some famous logo or brand name turned into a terrible fish-pun. I could almost hear some big, fat guy yelling "Get it? GET IT!? It's not 'CNN'! It's 'SEA-NN!' DO YOU GET IT?! IT'S FUNNY!" right in my ear.

AND WHY THE FUCK WAS WILL SMITH'S HUMAN-FACED FACE DANCING ON HIS BACK FINS LIKE A HUMAN!?! Wait, wrong movie.

Fucking puns. The lowest form of comedy. Cars 2 isn't as bad as Shark Tale or some other films, but it lowers its own bar by indulging in it enough.

But the puns are nothing compared to just how confusing the world of the cars is. This movie almost dares you to accept everything point blank and to ignore the voice in your head screaming at how none of it makes any sense.

Books 43-70: Lone Wolf and Cub

2011-10-08T18:00:00.001-05:00

Lone Wolf and Cub vol. 1-28 by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima (A)

Let's talk about epics. A lot of titles are given or try to claim the title of 'epic' by virtue of having a grand focus, covering many years or involving entire nations at war, but they fail to connect on any human level, the players mere ciphers or stock cliches who don't matter to us and thus don't give real weight to the story. A lesser example of what I'm talking about is Tron: Legacy, which has Kevin Flynn talking about rewriting science and religion and the arts with his discoveries but without actually saying how that's supposed to happen. It tries to imply depth without bothering to explain it. Good thing the movie never takes itself too seriously for this to be a hinderance.

Lone Wolf and Cub is an epic, that should not be denied. It pulls off the human aspect without sacrificing for the grandness of the saga, establishing the relationship between father Itto and son Daigoro at the core of the story while also sending the protagonists to a good range of different settings and introducing a diverse series of supporting characters (most who only appear in individual issues), and the overarching plot is suitably large, but without becoming too bloated to carry itself or too wild to make sense.

But, and I suppose I should get my primary criticism out of the way here and now, the pacing of the series starts to slip when the main story driving it, the feud between Ogami Itto and the Yagyu clan, becomes more and more defined. We get the first glimpse at this story at the end of volume 1, when a story owing a lot to Key Largo ends with a criminal recognizing Itto as the former executioner for the shogun. After that we get more insight as to why Itto left his post (he was framed by the Yagyu clan, whose leader desired his post), why he's become an assassin and eventually some hints at what his plan for revenge may be. And yet the series continues to work in "job of the chapter" stories where nothing related to the Yagyu is involved and we just have Ogami carrying out an assassination. This problem, the halting of the main plot, becomes more pronounced as the length of each chapter grows and more backstory central to that individual story is given.

A reason for this is that Koike continuously indulges in what I'll call 'history porn,' devoting individual stories to jobs or customs that have been forgotten over the centuries. He doesn't play this for nostalgia; the series takes place too far in the past for someone to have genuine nostalgia for the period (at best it's the Japanese equivalent of people obsessed with Renn Fairs, wishing they could go back to what they may or may not realize is an idealized/Disneyfied version of the Middle Ages). And because this is set too far in the past for people to remember those days, pages have to be spent explaining and/or showing (usually both) the duties of, say, the Yagyu Grass or men hired to carry people across a wide, dangerous river (that has no bridge because the shogun decided to take advantage of the natural barrier it formed along one side of Edo). It can be interesting and it gives flavor to each story, helping them stand out, but by the time I'm in volume 17 or 18 of 28, I'm more interested in the Yagyu plot than another story where Itto is hired to kill someone and he has to figure out some amazing and daring way to do it (which of course he will, because he's such a badass).

The chapters that fall into the 'history porn' aspect of the series can be interesting in themselves, but like the Monster of the Week stories of the X-Files or Village of the Week stories of Avatar: The Last Airbender, their place is early in the series when we're learning about the characters and world, and the introduction of an easily resolved, stand-alone story allows us to see them dealing with different obstacles and maybe learning some things. Once the main story is underway and the climax is in sight (if the X-Files had ever had a true denouement, that is) then the 'X of the week/issue' format should be let go.

I finished reading this series a couple weeks ago and have struggled since then whether to give this an A or an A- because the problem of the story's flow bothered me just enough that I considered marking points off. Yet after Contagion and Drive I've started to wonder if I'm becoming too cynical and unforgiving lately (I'm currently reading Gibson's Bigend Trilogy, and as much as I loved his earlier works these are just leaving me cold, enhancing my feeling of being overly-cynical), and the series as a whole is a massive triumph, so I decided I'll overlook this one problem and give it a full A.

On that note, it's quite ironic (or perfectly serendipitous) that I just mentioned Drive and Contagion because when the guys at Red Letter Media reviewed those two movies a while back they summed it up as "I loved these films, but I wouldn't recommend them to people I know. 'They're great, but you wouldn't like them.'" I kind of have that same impression of Lone Wolf and Cub. I'm a lifelong Japanophile, I love samurai stories, but much more importantly I understand (at least I like to think I understand) how Japanese culture and the samurai code and the philosophy of bushido and Ogami's way of thinking differ from the Western/American mindset.

Americans, I don't think, have any kind of belief in redemption or honor in death; or, at least, it's never presented as a good thing. It's something that can only happen if the character has crossed a line, done something so heinous that we need something as terrible as death to happen to them before we can forgive them. This definitely is not the same thing as the Japanese concept of seppuku to save face, with all its nuances about honor and loyalty and concepts that don't translate to action as well as atoning for a very clear sin like betraying your friends or family.

Yet Ogami constantly tells people that he and his son walk meifumado, the road to Hell, and that death has almost already taken them and they have no fear and nothing to lose. If this story was done in America we'd have a closed, nihilistic hero who, over the course of the story, learns to open up to someone (most likely a woman clearly established to be an eventual love interest) and the movie ends with him now opening up and becoming a mature adult or whatever. There would never be a scene where, right as Itto is about to face someone come to kill him, Daigoro slips into a frozen lake and risks drowning; to which Itto does nothing, focused solely on his own battle. That would never happen in an American story.

So I don't think I would recommend this story to someone who doesn't have at least some familiarity with Japanese culture. Maybe I'm underestimating my hypothetical non-Japanophiles, but I think true appreciation of the story and Itto's quest and his actions requires some knowledge of his society and culture.

Onto the art.

One of the most memorable images in samurai films (for me at least; I'm not claiming too much authority in this field) comes early in Yojimbo when Toshiro Mifune's nameless wanderer comes to a village currently being torn apart by a gang war. A dog trots by, a severed hand in its mouth. For all the swordplay you see in films, both full-on samurai films and other genres, most fights are rather bloodless. The severed hand is a shock.

Lone Wolf and Cub, from the first volume, is just as bloody and visceral (though it is toned down a bit as the series advances). Limbs are hacked off and fly away, blood erupts from wounds (Yojimbo's unofficial sequel Sanjuro contains its own searing image in this vein). It is all akin to a Western film that is at the level of the dirt and the dust; everyone gets dirty, and the work feels more real because of it. It's not a studio set with make-up and other tricks.

'Cinematic' may seem an obligatory, almost cliched, term for the art, but there is no other word for it. You practically watch the action unfold instead of just looking at each panel and filling in the gaps in your mind.

Sometimes Kojima goes overboard, taking the decompression idea further than it is used, but the norm is that it works. Either for establishing a scene and its mood, or for pausing during the pivotal moment of a battle (or to illustrate just how long the first duel between Itto and Retsudo Yajyu goes on, how endless it seems to those watching).

I would absolutely recommend this to anyone interested in Japan, and also to anyone interested in comics as an artform (even if there is that cultural problem I mentioned).

Drive

2011-10-06T12:40:00.002-05:00

I was really excited to see Drive, after months of hearing about Albert Brooks' performance and it getting an A from the AV Club. I'm still waiting for a movie that really wows me, and like Contagion this seemed like something I would really get into.

And it was really good. It takes the stylization far enough without going overboard, and Brooks' performance is impressive.

But, there is one thing that bothered me. Enough that I have to take some points off it, half a star. Ryan Gosling's character is too much of a blank. There's a scene in Act III where Brooks tells Gosling (roughly) "Whatever plans or dreams you may have had, you're going to have to put them on hold." And as I'm sitting there in the theater, I'm thinking to myself "What plans? What dreams?" I never got the feeling that Gosling's character actually wanted anything. His garage-owner friend is trying to sponsor him as a stock-car racer, but does he have a competitive streak or a desire to win? And we're led to believe he wants Carey Mulligan, but the film goes right up to the line of making this clear and then stops.

I'm not asking to be spoonfed everything, but just one little scene to make it clear that Gosling wants her would have improved things immeasurably. It would have given more weight to what happens when her husband comes back and Gosling tries to help him get out of debt, and everything that happens from there. Instead Gosling is playing a force less than a character, and it's hard to feel for him or those around him. Brooks' character actually earns more sympathy, as evil as he gets.

It's possible for a film to have a singular, significant flaw but to still overcome that if it excels in everything else. Drive comes close, but the fact that it holds the hero at a distance the way it does is just too much.

Occupy Wall Street attracting attention

2011-10-05T09:14:00.003-05:00

So I wrote about Occupy Wall Street yesterday, mentioning that both I and the media had been dismissive of the movement at first but are now noticing it as it's grown.

A clearer sign that the movement is doing something (even if that something is just drawing attention to how fed up people are) is that the Right is going on the offensive, going from ignoring the protestors to attacking them. And today I got a trio of cartoons from the usual gang of idiots attacking the protestors for being all protest-y and naive and hypocritical (I wish Gorrell had drawn the second panel of that cartoon, where the businessman who likes to spend his cigarette break holding a newspaper at an unreadable angle answers "No, we cut all the entry-level jobs to drive our stock up.")

To cleanse your palate, here's a couple people that actually get why the protests are taking place.

The Year in Crazy Part 89

2011-10-04T22:53:00.002-05:00

Not a complaint about what the Right has done this time, but the Obama administration.

In case you haven't seen it, an American citizen was killed on the orders of the American government without a trial or meeting any of the criteria that an individual can be stripped of their citizenship.

In other words: the US government has given itself the authority, and exercised that authority to the most extreme level possible, to ignore the rights of American citizens.

How? By branding the individual a terrorist.

I'm not writing this to defend whatever Anwar Alwaki has been accused of or what he has been proven to have done (though I'll repeat: he has not been proven to have done anything worthy of being stripped of his citizenship or rights). I'm not a lawyer; the most I will say is that while I do not agree with any of his anti-American sermons, he has the the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment because he was still an American citizen!

It's hard to explain just how unnerving this is: the government has assumed the right to kill American citizens without trial, without having to present any evidence to the public, and they're getting away with it because other than Glenn Greenwald, who's covering this?

Well, there have been a couple editorial cartoons, but for the most part they're OK with people classified as terrorists being killed. The government said they're bad guys, so it's alright that we're foregoing due process and evidence and trial by jury. It reminds me of the responses to the Casey Anthony verdict, except there were a lot more of those. What does it say about our country that more people know about tabloid fodder like Casey Anthony than they do the dismantling of our civil liberties?

As if I needed another reason to not vote for Obama. There is no way I can, in good conscious, vote for someone that would strip away the rights of Americans like some wanna-be king or emperor. They are not privileges that we enjoy at the pleasure of the government, they are fucking rights. We enjoy them whether the people in power like it or not. And at the risk of hyperbole: if the government doesn't honor that we have those rights, and if the people don't care that the government will freely take them from us, then perhaps America is already dead. Maybe this recession is an elaborate death scene before the country falls.

Head-up-their-ass morons so concerned about terrorists coming to kill them that they'll sacrifice any and everything that makes this country what it is. How the fuck can we still be going through this song-and-dance a full decade after 9/11?

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-04T14:30:00.002-05:00

I've been neglecting the blog for a while, because I've been doing ACTUAL WRITING! (Well, Rule 34 writing that I posted on my deviantArt account devoted to different fetishes, but it's writing nonetheless.) So I've got some catching up to do today.

First up, there's the Occupy Wall Street rally. I haven't been following it until recently for one of the reasons the media hasn't been following it: protests haven't worked in decades. That was one of the first lessons I learned during my political awakening earlier in life. A lot of angry (mostly young) people get together, chant a little, hold up some signs or get into ridiculous costumes, and then the energy dissipates and nothing has changed. (The other reasons the media have revolve around infotainment preferring vapid bullshit to real news; but you don't need me to tell you that).

But what seems to be happening with the Wall Street protest is that it isn't evaporating. Protestors have been set upon by the police, but we're just seeing more people showing up and sympathy protests popping up around the country. On that level, Occupy Wall Street has turned out to be a goddamned miracle for lasting this long.

Not that many on the Left, people sympathetic to the general attitude of the protestors, have woken up to that. The main issue from them has been the lack of a single list of demands. While I appreciate the logic there, I still have issue with it, and I'll discuss it in a bit.

But first, there's the much more ridiculous gripe that the protestors haven't dressed well, as summed up by Oliver Willis. His reasoning is that because these college kids and other un/underemployed protestors aren't wearing suits, they won't be taken seriously.

I really have to stop myself from just cussing out Willis for that, because as much as I love him, he really bugs me sometimes when he puts on the Establishment Democrat costume and chides people for not putting their faith in the Party and its leaders.

Seriously, he put up pictures of people wearing what I, and I expect many other people their age, consider to be normal wear. Jeans and t-shirts may not be the most stylish wardrobe choice, but Willis goes straight into snobbish territory by comparing them to (his words, not mine) "a dope-smoking hobo."

The issues that have welled up and led to Occupy Wall Street have been about class warfare on behalf of the rich, income inequality, and rising unemployment and poverty. And Willis' response to people taking to the streets opposed to this, in all probability the people affected by this, is to sniff and say "Get a haircut"? What the fucking fuck? Maybe if he had had pictures of the most stereotypical hippie-wannabes imaginable he might have had a point. But the people I see there look like college students and 20-somethings. Willis is just being elitist as well as condescending, the same insulting attitude he takes when arguing with Glenn Greenwald over how Obama has extended Bush's worst practices in the War on Terror.

Not that I'm dismissing his complaint entirely. I said up above protests usually draw people who think that they can get a point across with stupid costumes or silly signs, and I'm sure there are some like that at OWS. I'm also not surprised that the usual suspects have been trying to shoehorn in their pet (non-economic) issues. Which makes it even more impressive that the protest is growing.

Then there's the other complaint, the "what do you want?" complaint that Willis and Ted Rall (who seemed to think the protest was fizzling a week ago) have echoed. Via Pat's post:

A friend of mine working for the Obama reelection campaign dismisses the group as a bunch of kids without a plan. "They're event organizers, not community organizers. They have no structure, no organization. What they're doing won't translate into votes."

Oh noes, this won't help Obama's reelection campaign! And we need him to reelected, because he's a community organizer and he's shown how much better a community organizer is than event organizers because all our problems have been fixed!

Except 'Jobs' is perennially off Obama's radar, so I don't see what good a community organizer is who won't talk about the fucking issue!

Yes, there is merit to the complaint that the lack of a statement of principles or demands makes the protesters look disorganized, childish, and their efforts easily ignored.

But is that a bad thing? Any other time I would have said 'yes.' If people won't listen to what you're saying, if they ignore your demonstrations, then what's the use?

But things have been so bad for so long, and there's been virtually nothing happening in Washington. If anything, what Washington has done has just been rubbing salt in the nation's wounds, extending the tax cuts for the rich, focusing all their attention on the top 1% (who they oh-so-cleverly call 'job creators' because saying "let's help just the obscenely rich" sounds bad) and trying to shift even more of the tax burden onto the bottom whatever-percent.

There's little-to-no reason to believe the political and economic systems of the country will fix themselves. The people running the government and wielding all of the economic power either cannot or (more likely) don't care to stop what's going on because a) it doesn't affect them and/or b) it benefits them.

So really, what are protests supposed to accomplish? The couldn't prevent the Iraq invasion, they didn't result in Bush and Cheney being tried for warcrimes, and they won't result in a withdraw in Afghanistan. What will Occupy Wall Street accomplish?

Probably nothing. But I think there's something of value in just disrupting the everyday. Introduce a little anarchy, except maybe without blowing up any hospitals. So long as the people in power can ignore the problems people are facing, nothing will change. I don't expect Occupy Wall Street to change anything, not by itself, but the longer it goes on, the more people gather, the harder it will be for Obama, Reid, Boehner, whomever to pretend nothing needs to be done. The media too; they're finally paying attention.

If this could last weeks, or possibly months, maybe something can happen. But I'm jaded enough to say "probably nothing."

Books 39-42: Zombies!

2011-09-22T21:26:00.002-05:00

Marvel Zombies 4 (B-)
Marvel Zombies 5 (B)
Marvel Zombies Return (C+)

The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics (B-)

Let's talk about genre. When I reviewed Contagion I discussed how the movie was both served well and hindered by adhering to the general arc of a plague story. It hits the right notes and does so in, metaphorically speaking, a rich and deep tune, but it never establishes itself as something unique (aside from the fact that plague stories are so rare that other than this and Outbreak, what else is there?).

Zombie stories are much more plentiful than generic plague stories (there's something more viscerally appealing (pun intended) about a threat that needs to be treated with bullets rather than medicine), but that doesn't mean an automatic expansion of where the story can go. The subgenre has made little effort to escape its Romero roots, and every new movie or video game falls back on the standard tropes like people holed up in a house surrounded by zombies and the zombies themselves are shuffling, unintelligent ghouls. There are changes now and then, such as giving the undead the ability to run, and I just recently (making up for lost time) watched Return of the Living Dead, with zombies that can run, speak, and solve problems (they can even engage in psychological warfare, trying to make a potential victim despair to the point of giving up the fight).

But most people are content to just riff on the familiar melodies, maybe with a standout setting or making the zombies unique in some way. So many stories just want to take the basic ideas and change the dressing, either they're beholden to the genre itself or they just don't have the imagination to break free. So when I see a new zombie story, I can't not measure it by how much it plays with or goes against genre convention.

The Marvel Zombies series has been fun not only for bringing superheroes into the equation, but for also allowing them to retain all of their intelligence. This not only makes them much more dangerous a threat, but also allowed the first two volumes of the saga (it's a loose collection of miniserieses, not an ongoing story) to focus attention on them as protagonists themselves (complete with some character growth here and there). This means the earliest stories in Ultimate Fantastic Four and Marvel Zombies 1 and 2 weren't just retreads of "boarded house surrounded by the undead." In fact, the UFF story had, at one point, the Zombie!Fantasic Four contained by forcefield and surrounded by the military. A neat reversal of the usual trope.

The thing is, the first two volumes told a nice, self-contained story that took things as far as they logically could. Yes, volume 2 ends with the remaining zombies being sent to another dimension, but did we need to see the same story told again? Volume 3 (which I read a couple years ago) ignored all the characters from 1 and 2 and introduced a new story with the remaining zombies trying to break into the regular 616 universe, a gamble that more or less paid off. (Though it did raise the question of where Zombie!Kingpin, Zombie!Jackal and the rest went after their clone farm was trashed and before the survivors on Asteroid M came back to Earth). Bringing in Z-listers like Machine Man and Morbius was a nice change from seeing yet another story dominated by Spider-Man and Wolverine, and the story was fun while it lasted.

I held off on continuing with the line because I didn't really see where things could go, but fall is here now, which for me means Halloween, which means scary, terrifying things (spare me the Hallmark-style cutesy shit; the cartoonish witches and ghosts making terrible puns while hocking greeting cards and plush dolls). Which means zombies. So when I got paid last week I decided to buy the next three volumes of Marvel Zombies, and also a doorstopper-sized collection of indie zombie comics.

It wasn't a regrettable decision. Volume 4 continued from volume 3 with Morbius and other Z-listers trying to isolate the remaining strains of the plague in the 616-verse, which includes Zombie!Deadpool's head, a funny bit that wasn't overused. The story isn't bad, and I liked the inclusion of classic voodoo zombies (for as little as they were there), but it is, really, just another "stop the virus before it can spread" tale (though with the change-up that the virus becomes a sentient mass-organism at one point; that's new). And since I don't really know who any of the characters are, I wasn't invested any more than I am with the characters in a regular "group of survivors are holed up in a building surrounded by the undead" story.

Volume 5 was much better, right from the cover with Howard the Duck and Machine Man shooting zombies. The story isn't any more unique, it's just Howard and Aaron (and a girl speedster-gunslinger they pick up in issue one) universe-hopping to collect samples of different zombies so that Morbius can hopefully create a cure. This volume never takes itself seriously, and is definitely more about making jokes or trying out new ideas that don't go beyond a one-shot story (a techno-virus that cannibalizes cyborgs, or a self-aware zombie struggling with what's happened to him), but it's consistently entertaining, which counts for something even if it doesn't amount to much in the end.

And then Marvel Zombies Return is, guess what, about the original zombies from volumes 1 and 2. The miniseries sees them each appearing in the same dimension, but at different points in history, giving the writers the chance to work with different parts of Marvel history. This doesn't mean anything in terms of writing, but like volume 5 it allows for different artists to do their own thing. There is an overarching plot, with Zombie!Spider-Man trying to find a cure for their condition and to prevent the outbreak of the plague in this new universe (he's unsuccessful on that latter part), but some rather obvious plotholes popped up after I was done reading it. Such as, if Spider-Man found a cure for the zombie plague, why go to the trouble of trying to lure the last few zombies to a fight sequence instead of tracking them down and taking them out (even if it has to be one by one)? And why did the Zombie!Wolverine issue end with a close-up of that universe's Wolverine having been bitten when he doesn't end up turning? Poor editing there.

Also, while I loved the just-plain-wrongness of Zombie!Spider-Man trying to shoot webbing and instead shooting out his own arteries instead, it was established in the first issue of volume 1 that this Spider-Man had mechanical shooters, not organic ones. Minor point, and like I said I loved the squick-factor of it.

At any rate, I'm glad the series is done (I'm considering it done, at least) because while it was entertaining for what it was, it's past run its course.

***

Onto the Mammoth Book, which like all anthologies is a mixed bag. Most of the stories are short (just several pages) and work off of one idea that may or may not be explored too much, but there's a couple longer works like Dead Eyes Open, a story about people dying of natural causes coming back with full retention of their knowledge and emotions. Tracking the world's response to this development at both the macro and micro levels, this was easily the best of the compendium, and alone makes it worth checking out the collection.

But many of the other stories don't measure up. Some don't go anywhere and feel as if there's a second and third act missing, some are just "let's establish a zombie apocalypse and then have a twist," and one of the stories is about a mummy, which is not the same thing!

As I said, Dead Eyes Open is the best of the book, and a Southern Gothic adaption of a Robert E Howard story - Pigeons From Hell - is superb at using atmosphere and dread, plus a couple of the shorties like Pariah and Job Satisfaction have life in them (pun not intended) for as brief as they are. But there's also some middling stuff to slog through if you, as I did, read it straight through.

I find myself wishing that, for as ubiquitous as zombie stories have become, there were more good zombie stories. The social commentary possibilities have been stretched pretty thin (but not drained completely, I hope, since I've got an idea for my own zombie story), and I understand how apocalypse stories, by killing off most of humanity, limit the number of character-types possible, but there's still plenty of potential for the genre. If writers would stop treating the genre like a video game set-up maybe we could get the next Dawn of the Dead or The Walking Dead.

Ron Paul's Greater Pleasantville

2011-09-21T12:21:00.003-05:00

It was just a day or two ago I was thinking about how conservatives (speaking generally here; don't bother pointing out specific counterexamples, please) have a - at times morbid - idealization of the Small Town. The tightly-knit community where everyone knows everyone and, if they're not friends, at least they're polite to each other on the street.

It's not as if conservatives have pulled this ideal out of thin air, not entirely. The media, for over half a century, has propagated the idea of small-town/suburban enclaves full of open, friendly people genuinely concerned about one another. At the same time, the other side of the coin is that big cities are scary, violent, overwhelming dens of sin and despair.

Even if no conservative pundit or Republican candidate/politician will outright say "We need a world that's like Leave it to Beaver" (or they'll do it rarely), this is an underlying part of the typical conservative mindset: insular is safe. Being surrounded by people you don't know or who aren't like you is bad and should be avoided. Who are these people? Where do they come from, what are their values, what are their beliefs? Stick to a small town and you'll know you're with your people.

But real life doesn't support that ideal. The vast majority (I read somewhere as much as 80%) of Americans live in big cities or in the suburban towns that surround them. Only a fifth of Americans live in actual small towns away from big cities, and even then I doubt many of those people mirror the characters of Pleasantville, where everybody knows everyone. We live in a world of increasingly specialized sub-genres and sub-sub-genres of music, movies, books, and video games, and more importantly we have an Internet that allows people to seek out others who share our specialized, unique interests, instead of having to make due with those who are near us physically/geographically.

All this came to mind recently, as I said, though I felt no urgency to write about it when I didn't have anything to say. It was just an observation. But this week Jen Sorenson put out a cartoon about Ron Paul's assertion that without healthcare reform/universal healthcare people in need of medical help can get it from their neighbors, their churches.

It's clear why Paul would think this. The "Small town rallies to help person" scene is almost like Hallmark-produced porn for these people, reinforcing the idea of salt-of-the-Earth people helping one another without a government handout (because if the government got involved then the Haves coming together to help a Have-Not would immediately become socialism). Although the first example of such a story that comes to my mind - the finale of It's a Wonderful Life - may not appeal to those who identify with/look up to Mr. Potter.

But there's also the idea of churches coming in to save people, which appeals to the religiously-tribal members of the gOP and adds a "We take care of our own" sentiment that places a wink-wink, nudge-nudge emphasis on the last two words that isn't racist (heavens no!) but it demonstrates real Americans helping other real Americans.

But as Sorenson points out in the text after the cartoon, there's an amazing bit of cognitive dissonance in the party of big corporations and big-box retailers that strip individualism away piecemeal in pursuit of the largest bottom-line and the largest bank account. Corporations supplanting nations, and where would (where will) the small town fit into such a world?

Sorenson also mentions giant SUVs and gated McMansion compounds, but I don't see those as being anti-community or anti-small town. Suburban enclaves like the ones in Snow Crash may very well end up supporting a mutated version of the idealization of the small town eventually; the "I'm surrounded by people just like me, and that makes me safe" mentality would certainly endure in that world. But there is the question of how the Small Town cultists expect small towns to carry on without a significant source of incoming revenue after the last factories are closed down and sent overseas by the (duh) big corporations looking to maximize profits.

I have no illusions about the reality of Pleasantville or Leave it to Beaver-world or any other idealized small town where everyone is neat, upright, friendly and it's one big happy family. That never existed in real life and even if something like it could be established in the 21st century (think of the revelation in Shyamalan's The Village, only with picket fences and girls in poodle skirts), globalization and the world-spanning Melting Pot going on right now will render that concept unsustainable. I can't imagine a community in the 21st century devoted to perfect isolationism, and as the world changes countries (and with them the small communities therein) will have to change as well.

But conservativism is, ultimately, about maintaining a status quo in the face of change, adaptation and growth. Conservatives by and large want things to return to some point in the past and to stay there. They look backwards or, to be generous, at some point in the present. It's never really about looking forward and seeing how we can change as individuals or groups.

So instead of Republicans/conservatives looking at something big and new like universal healthcare as even a possibility, they recoil in horror. They shout "Socialism!" and "Death panels!" because, yes, universal healthcare would be a little bit of death to them. A piece of the world as they know it would die, things would change, and that's bad.

The Year in Crazy Part 88

2011-09-21T12:14:00.004-05:00

This won't even qualify as a blip in any year-end wraps ups, but I wanted to bring up this because after this and Steven Seagal killing a puppy with a tank, I have to ask: why does Joe Arpaio keep getting reelected as sheriff? Is his whole community batshit insane? Are they so lizard-brain focused on "being tough on crime" that they'll just ignore his constant camera whoring and downright sad attempts at becoming a reality TV star?

Who are these people?

The Year in Crazy Part 87: Baby Jesus was evil

2011-09-21T11:47:00.002-05:00

Here, look at this (click it for fullsize):
What bullshit.

Now, I'm hardly one to defend Islam in general, and I'll admit a certain reflex in assuming bad things of the more fundamentalist adherents (I don't mean that I assume any bad thing to happen is the result of "Islamo-fascism" terrorism or anything so stupid; I just think of any religion today, Islam is the most probable source of acts of terrorism). But come on! Simple logic here: over a billion Muslims in the world, millions of which live in America, and we don't see stories every day of Muslims shooting or stabbing women in pants or people drinking beer or eating pork.

Why, it's almost as if *GASP* most Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens that have little interest beyond living their own lives as they see fit. Almost as if violent Muslims are just a small subset of Islam as a whole, just as people who blow up abortion clinics do not represent all of Christianity. Fancy that.

But beyond the "Islam has always been violent" claim of the chart is the comparison points of Judaism and Christianity. As the original source of the graph points out, Christianity is shown to have been absolutely violent in 3 AD. Meaning baby Jesus was outright evil. And the rise to nonviolence is a constant slope over the centuries, implying that Jesus and the Apostles were more violent than the Crusaders and Inquisitors.

Basic logic fail, that there.

Also, I like how Jews are implied to have taken longer to become nonviolent than Christians, as their slope is more gradual and arrives at the same point of nonviolence as Christians around the same point in history.

Since this story broke the FBI has distanced itself from the people who created and used the graph in their presentation, so we've already gone into the "CYA/bury and forget" part of this controversy. Give it another week and everyone will have forgotten about it.

Which is fine in that this little bit of stupidity is not the worst thing possible, but bad in that it's representative of the ongoing bias against Muslims that is taken for granted in even official government agencies. "All Muslims are potential terrorists" or "Islam itself preaches violence and evil" are still accepted as common knowledge, which isn't just ignorant and bigoted, but also distracts from real attempts to combat terrorism. In fact, it even helps al Qaeda by legitimizing the idea that Islam must be at war with non-Muslim society.

It's not just stupid. It's dangerous.

Going Twitter Dark

2011-09-19T22:38:00.003-05:00

With how fast Internet time is compared to real time, it has become beyond cliched to criticize Twitter for being a fount of narcissism and vapid thoughts, cutting off the part of the brain that separates the individual's stream of conscious from their prime biological point of expression (in other words, preventing someone from saying anything that pops into their head).

Yes, it is true that Twitter can feed such a vain habit, but it is hardly the norm. So when I say that I need to take a break from Twitter, it is not because I have grown weary of the program itself. At times I do tire of how much certain people tweet, and I've unfollowed many celebrities because they have nothing of value to say, but the system itself is stronger than its flaws.

No, the problem is that I put too much priority on Twitter, constantly checking updates on Tweetdeck and even, when things have backlogged, devoting hours to reading through days' worth of tweets, finding just a few gems of worthwhile links or genuinely amusing thoughts. In addition to, of course, people that tweet too much and the inescapable vapidness of many of the tweets.

It has gotten to the point that I feel I am overwhelmed in the small and transitional; Twitter, for all the good it does in spreading news faster or helping protest movements grow, is ultimately about the moment, about small bursts of the temporary.

I've spent the past couple weeks making my way through the first half of Lone Wolf and Cub and I'm close to finishing the first book of William Gibson's Bigend trilogy. These are not mammoth works, true, but they require more focus and attention than any given tweet. I also have a stack of surfing magazines dating back a year (with a few backissues of Skeptic thrown in) and it has now been over a month since I took a break from my Camp NaNoWriMo project. As feared/expected, my fire for that project has gone out, but on the upside I have a new idea I want to work with, as well as a couple short stories I'd like to write.

But I spend my time away from work catching up with Google Reader or Tweetdeck, instead of devoting time to more substantial things.

So for the immediate future I am going Twitter dark. I've closed out Tweetdeck and I'm not opening it again until I feel things are under control. I don't know if this means I've gone through all the magazines I have saved up or I've written X amount of stuff. I'm playing it by ear. I don't think I'll want to stay away forever, but maybe if I spend enough time away from it I can get a clearer perspective on just who I want to be following; this is one thing that has always given me trouble. I try to pare down my following list and I always leave a few people/groups I think sound interesting, but who I know deep down aren't worth following.

At the very least I hope to get some stuff done, namely reading and writing. Even if its illusionary, just the feeling of bringing some order to my life will be good.

Too Precious

2011-09-15T10:05:00.003-05:00

Don't really want to comment, it's just hilarious by itself. But still, the duck lips thing? Really?

Is this another pathetic attempt at phishing or something?

Contagion

2011-09-13T11:24:00.003-05:00

We're nearing the halfway mark of September and I have yet to see a movie I would give four stars to. The main reason is that Cedar Rapids, while a step up from Leesville in terms of cultural opportunities, doesn't have any theaters devoted to foreign and independent films. I'm pretty sure Tree of Life didn't open here at all (though The Undefeated did, briefly; I didn't see it). On top of that the summer offerings (which in the past have included Inception, Funny People, The Dark Knight, and Ratatouille, each of which I consider the best films of their respective years) have been a mixed bag. I loved all three Marvel superhero movies, but was let down by Pirates 4 and Kung Fu Panda 2. And I didn't bother to see Green Lantern and haven't seen Cars 2 yet (I'll probably see the latter before I see the former, but I'm not looking forward to it).

Then for most of the summer my finances took a hit and I didn't see anything, and it was only recently that I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes (better than a movie with no reason to exist had any right to be) and Harry Potter 8 (good overall, but a bit perfunctory; no room for the plot to go anywhere since it was all about bringing things to a close). And then yesterday I saw Contagion, which, while good enough to prompt a blogpost, still didn't reach four-stars for me.

The thing is this is a perfect virus-story, which I, having long been fascinated with viruses, feel there aren't enough of (I'm not counting zombies - a genre unto themselves - here). But the problem is this is a perfect virus-story. It's like the Platonic Ideal of a plague-story, with everything you would want in it (tracking the initial spread of the disease, the rising panic, the breakdown of society, riots, people out to make a quick buck, misinformation being spread, people coughing dramatically, scientists working to find a vaccine), but it seldom breaks out of the plague sub-sub-genre and the steps I just mentioned.

There are some bright spots, particularly Jude Law's character's arc (possible spoilerish: he's an anti-vax blogger who trumpets a drug that he says cured him; at the end of the movie it's revealed he faked the disease and being cured and collected millions from the company that manufactured the drug). The movie makes it clear the doctors are the real heroes as they find a cure and (more or less) do the right thing every step of the way, as opposed to Law's conspiracy fantasies about Big Pharma and the government.

I say 'more or less' because there are a couple points where the doctors behave unethically; once for personal gain (Laurence Fishburne (looking kind of like Neil deGrasse Tyson) warning a loved one to get out of a city about to be quarantined) and once to speed-up the discovery of a vaccine (she injects herself with the vaccine after it's found to work in chimps and then infects herself with the virus). In the latter case it pays off for the good of the world at large, but the movie comes close to an 'end justifies the means' argument here.

The rest of the film doesn't slack off in how it goes about the predetermined story and individual parts like the riots and piles of corpses, and it should be complimented for avoiding all the pathos temptations. The movie is frank, but it never overloads the drama and misery OR the opposite, with Big Damn Hero moments like "I'VE FOUND A CURE! WE'RE SAVED!" Even when a cure is found the movie is upfront about how it will take months or even more than a year to manufacture and distribute the vaccine.

Though the movie can't quite escape some true Wallbanger moments (most egregious: "I'm going to tell you a secret, but you can't tell anyone.") And there is some Americanitis to the film, with the story threads in Asia and... well, in Asia being forgotten once the plague gets going.

So yes, Contagion was everything I wanted in a virus-story, which is both a plus and a minus.

The Year in Crazy Part 86: Cheers!

2011-09-10T12:49:00.004-05:00

My Tweetdeck filled up over the past few days, which meant I could either close the thing down (deleting all the unread tweets) or try to catch up. Since I don't have to go into work until late this afternoon, I opted for the latter.

Now I kind of regret it, because the tweets in my politics thread covered the gOP debate from Wednesday night, which included this... "gem"

Cheering the death penalty. Cheering the number of people executed. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

I do not support the death penalty. At all. I believe I understand the logic death penalty supporters follow (some crimes are so terrible that only executing the perpetrator can qualify as restitution), but I don't agree with it. Justice is about the idea of restoring balance, righting wrongs; that if one person harms another in some way they themselves are punished in a way equivalent (if not exactly equal to) the crime itself. But in a reasoned, enlightened society we cannot follow "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" thinking because that is not balance. If someone has committed murder and you respond by executing the murderer, you have gone from one dead person to two dead people. That is not balance, that is escalation.

Apart from that, my opposition to the death penalty is also rooted in the fundamental, irrevocable fact that the criminal justice system is flawed, because it is maintained by humans and humans are fallible. Merely on that basic level, the basic fact that 'mistakes happen,' we should stop and assess the morality and logic of pursuing that ultimate extreme in judicial punishment: government-sanctioned murder.

But beyond the generic 'mistakes happen' level we have documented cases of innocent people accused, tried, convicted and, yes, executed for crimes they did not commit. We have documented cases of people on Death Row exonerated. We have documented cases of law enforcement agencies withholding evidence or not pursuing evidence because of laziness, bias, or a desire to maintain arrest and conviction records at the expense of truth and justice.

The criminal justice system is deeply flawed in many ways. That is not opinion. When you have websites devoted to tracking the number of innocent people convicted or executed, you cannot argue or deny that the system needs to be fixed. And logic dictates that a flawed methodology should not be used so flippantly, the mistakes not swept under the rug or ignored.

But people like the death penalty. People like the idea of classic punishment, of barbaric eye-for-an-eye measures. It's purely visceral, nothing but emotion. And that's why you have people cheering for 200+ executions within one state. Because it's an exhilarating thought, those big, bad criminals getting what they deserve. Such finality. Such force. It's childish. It's backwards. Our society needs to grow up.

UPDATE: It's not just criminals the Tea Party wants to kill, it's also poor people.

The Year in Crazy Part 85

2011-09-10T10:54:00.003-05:00

I'm a few days late to comment on this (a common occurrence, I know), but if you haven't heard about the fauxtroversy over James Hoffa's Labor Day remarks, watch this. You'll see the editing and the full remarks.

Conservative media loves nothing more than manufactured controversies about inconsequential things they can trump up to the level of Scandal of the Century, and the usual gang of idiots have weighed in, including a pair of toons from Henry Payne, runner-up to the title of Shittiest Editorial Cartoonist in All the Land (particularly for his habit of repeating the same idea with slight variations, worse examples than these in existence).

I don't think there's anything unique about this latest attempt at trying to paint Obama as coarse, unrefined, intimidating. It's just another example of Right-Wing media attempting to paint their own reality, trying to convince their viewers that the dreaded Other Side is a bunch of bullies who need to resort to threats because their rhetoric is lacking.

Same old, same old.

Book 38: 1969

2011-09-08T20:21:00.003-05:00

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Century: 1969 by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (B)

A year and a half ago I reviewed 1910, part one of the LoEG - Century trilogy. I commented on the spot-the-reference game that always added to the series but never distracted from it, and I summed it up as getting me interested in a story I wasn't fully onboard with.

I'll repeat it here: having LoEG move from a Victorian-era action series to a modern commentary/essay on fiction itself is serious mood whiplash. And, speaking personally, not very welcome considering that Moore has already created and carried out another series solely for the sake of laying out all this thoughts on magic. Can't LoEG just get by on its own merits?

Well, that seems to be where Century is headed, though I miss the Victorian setting. 1910 focused on the here-and-now, with the new incarnation of the team not working too well and apparently dissolving. 1969 carries out the same straightforward plotting, with Mina, Allan and Orlando returning to England to prevent the birth of the Antichrist, and while magic plays a role in the story, it's an element of it, not an overbearing theme (though Moore's other preoccupation - sex in all its forms - is inescapable; given the Swinging Sixties setting, however, I concede it's unavoidable). The story itself is pretty slight, as the ceremony the trio are sent to prevent turns out to not be the infernal birth, but rather another bodyswapping performed by an evil magician introduced in 1910 (but who is, nonetheless, heading the plan to bring about the Antichrist). By itself the story doesn't really go anywhere until the surprising ending, and instead it's just a chapter in a larger story; and not the most satisfying possible, either, as the antagonists of the piece are still nebulous and their goals uncertain.

Much of the book is instead focused on the relationships between the three immortals, and in particular Mina trying to come to grips with immortality and keeping up with an ever-changing world. That part was really interesting, and I would have enjoyed seeing how Mina's personal journey played if SPOILER she hadn't vanished at the end of the book. END SPOILER

As far as the hidden reference game goes, I didn't even try to piece out anything because Moore and O'Neill present London in 1969 as one giant orgy of hippies and counter-culturalists whose outfits veer towards costumes or elaborate pageantry as often as not. I probably pegged more than one background character as a reference to some other piece of fiction when they were in fact just an ordinary NPC dressed in the style of the times. In fact I was so intent on trying to avoid identifying anyone that I missed a major one I should have gotten, as it came in two parts and was even telegraphed in 1910! It was just now when I was looking at Wikipedia that I found out what I had missed, and I almost smacked myself for it.

Aside from the overabundance of colors primary and secondary and countless nipples and penises, O'Neill's art can be frustrating when it comes to faces and his inability or apathy in creating distinctive persons. Unless a character has an identifying piece of clothing (like Mina's scarf) or body type, it can be difficult to keep track of them, especially with new characters.

Perhaps once the last volume comes out I'll reread and reappraise the entire trilogy as one piece. Still, if you plan to write a story as three distinct parts, each should stand on its own.

Book 37: Tokyo Vice

2011-09-05T09:14:00.005-05:00

Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein (B+)

Jake Adelstein is an American-born Jew who lived in Japan for a couple decades, working as a reporter covering vice and organized crime. He quit several years ago after being threatened by the largest yakuza organization in Japan, then went back to write the story he had been scared off of before. That's the surface story of the book, which covers his start at a major newspaper, his assignment to a neighborhood devoted almost solely to the sex industry, and then his coverage of some major yakuza stories, culminating in his discovery that the boss of the largest organization had come to America to receive a liver transplant.

The book is simultaneously about journalism and crime, and when it comes to crime it's simultaneously about how journalists gather stories and cover then and how the police investigate them. This gives the book a sort of formlessness, but there's a logic behind it. It's like the difference between knowing how to perform some martial arts moves (the hard data) and being able to adapt and improvise in a fight (the application of data). Adelstein isn't just telling his story, because his story involves cops and criminals and other reporters and he needs to tell their stories as well, so as much as he's telling the story he's guided by it as well.

But what is surprising about the book's form is a subtle motif: the feeling of not being on solid ground. Adelstein is a foreigner in a culture that always has something new to reveal to him. The yakuza, despite Western preconceptions, are not just thugs or an Asian equivalent of the Mafia; they're organized and enjoy a sense of legitimacy and popularity. And in the book's structure, there's a clear path from Adelstein applying for a journalism job up to his leaving the job and then his commitment to writing the story he once backed off of, but it's not a linear "A lead to B lead to C" type story. Things are seldom clearly 'this' or 'that.' There's nuance and subtleties based on the culture or the circumstances or any number of other factors.

The clearest example may be when Adelstein is transfered to Kabukicho, a red-light district in Tokyo, and the explanation of what is and is not prostitution is given. Basically, offering or trying to buy actual sex is illegal, but 'actual sex' is defined only as penis-in-vagina. Everything else is legal, and Kabukicho has businesses catering to everything else. The police in that area (or similar ones) are mainly there to keep order and keep the business owners from pushing too hard against the letter of the law.

Yes, it's all sex and carnal pleasure for money, but it's not actual prostitution. Except when it is, but if it involves foreign women then, well, the police still don't really get involved. One of the stand-out sections of the book is Adelstein learning about how human trafficking is carried on in Japan with the police and other authorities doing little to nothing about it. If Adelstein had tried to force a clear narrative to his story he could have claimed that this was when he went from passive journalist to active JOURNALIST, a fighter for the underdog, dedicated to exposing the truth, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. But he doesn't try anything so gaudy. He's always upfront about his own shortcomings and failings, even when it involves something that may haunt him for the rest of his life.

My main criticism of the book is that while Adelstein is willing to let the stories develop and almost tell themselves, he sometimes neglects to pause for an establishing description. Events in his own life are glossed over; worst of all is when he's transfered to Kabukicho and he off-handedly mentions he's now married. He goes back later and explains how his wife-to-be gave him three-month time limit when they first started dating (she was approaching 30 and, well, that's past Christmas Cake territory, I guess).

But it also applies to the parts related to crime and criminals. He's chronicling stories from a different culture, one that's markedly different from American and other Western cultures, and while Adelstein may not be a vetted sociologist, he still has lived in Japan for a couple decades and should understand what needs to be explained to his American audience.

The most glaring problem may be how the yakuza's role in Japanese culture and society is glossed over; I said above that the yakuza is not a direct mirror of the Mafia. People who have seen the Sopranos and Goodfellas might leap to the wrong idea of what the yakuza is like. I can understand if Adelstein didn't want to glamorize the yakuza (there are actual fan magazines of them in Japan), but perhaps he went a little too far in painting them common thugs and criminals?

So this book doesn't work as a primer on organized crime in Japan; it has a lot of stories and factoids, but the overall picture is lacking. But it's a good read if you can keep in mind that this is Adelstein's story, not a mob epic or a "journalist exposes society's ills" crowd-pleaser.

Kang laughs at you

2011-09-04T09:28:00.002-05:00

From the sky comes a scream, as Homer is crashing right into the
Capitol. A few footsteps later, he comes running down the stairs.

Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're
nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]
[audience gasps in terror]
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about
it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.
[murmurs]
Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system.
Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.
[Kang and Kodos laugh out loud]
[Ross Perot smashes his "Perot 96" hat]

Catching up on Google Reader this morning I saw that Pat R. has commented on my comments on not voting for Obama next year:

The only point on which my conscience disagrees with Mr. Pangrac's is that I still feel obligated vote for Obama as a matter of moral pragmatism. A vote for Obama is essentially a vote against the Bachmann/Perry/Romney Schrödinger's candidate on the other side. A vote for a third party is a plus-zero for both candidates' "scores." In light of the crass nationalism, dogmatism, social irresponsibility, and aggressive ignorance that has lately metastasized throughout the G.O.P. like a belligerent lymph-borne cancer, the election of any Republican candidate to the top of the Executive Branch could reasonably be expected to carry disastrous consequences. It puts a bad taste in my mouth, but voting for a lousy and ineffective President is the most expedient means of preventing an outright dangerous President from entering the White House.

This proves something I said almost two years ago. The lasting legacy of the 2000 election is that because Ralph Nader is viewed as spoiling Gore's campaign, the Democrats can now intimidate and frighten people on the Left into voting for whatever weaksauce candidate they put forward so long as they're not as crazy as the Republican candidate.

And it doesn't look like the Republicans will be moving away from the crazy far-Right people anytime soon.

This may not sound too bad right now, since the Republican candidates (particularly Bachmann and Perry) are so crazy and Obama still seems reasoned and rational*, but what will happen in 2016? In 2020? That's a pretty long time, especially in the political world, but I don't see even a hint of change coming anytime soon.

Not when those of us on the Left will continue to play this game, the game of Two-Party System. We're presented with a binary either/or choice - Democrat or Republican - in a system the requires no such thing. There is not a single law at any level (federal, state, county, whatever) limiting the number of parties that may participate in any election. But we accept that "this is a two-party system." We accept it so hard that no one ever has to actually say it. Whoever talks about an election will cast as D vs. R, as if this were a football game and of course you can only have two teams playing in a football game.

That's not what our system is supposed to be like. Our political system is supposed to be like Super Smash Bros. or any other game where you can have four or more people running around, fighting each other and defending from all the other opponents at once. We're supposed to have multiple viewpoints on any given issue represented. We're supposed to have actual choice, goddammit.

We don't have that, and it's because people don't care. By far the most commonly utilized third choice in any election is to stay home and not vote, and the people in power (economic, political, whatever) aren't upset by that. Fuck, I'll come right out and say it: they want this to happen. They want everyone to accept that their only choices are "Republican, Democrat, or don't vote," just as soda manufacturers love that shoppers are stuck with "Coke, Pepsi, or don't drink soda." I'm not saying there's an actual agreement (or conspiracy) between Coke and Pepsi to paint the choice of soda as 'one, the other, or nothing,' but that's what people see it as. Restaurants serve either one or the other, stores give disproportionate shelving space to both of them, virtually any vending machine is Coke or Pepsi or one of the non-cola offerings produced by the companies (Sprite and 7-Up, for example).

And likewise, the media and the public see elections as D or R or nothing, only this is enabled by people thinking they need to vote for someone who can win. They need their vote to count, and it can only count if it goes to the winner or the runner-up. If voting your conscience or voting for the candidate who best represents your ideals means voting for a third-party candidate, then you're just throwing your vote away.

How? How can voting for who you want to win be considered a waste? I voted for Nader in 2000 and I have never considered it a waste. He was the candidate I wanted to win. What would have been a waste, what would have been a betrayal of what democracy is on the deepest, most fundamental level, would have been to say "Well, I like Nader, but I'm worried about what would happen if Bush wins, so I guess I have to support Gore."

I don't view elections as a defensive game. I don't see it as trying to fight off the worst-case scenario, which usually involves supporting a not-good-but-less-bad candidate. More often than not, it's a waste to not fight for the best-case scenario. Unless the best-case would come at a cost so high that any victory would be rendered Pyrrhic, then the noble, dare I say moral, act is to fight for that and to only accept a less-than-best-case when circumstances are so overwhelming that you cannot struggle on any more.

Obama will get the Democratic nomination next year, I will wager anything on that. But that does not mean my hand is being forced. The ill-considered claim "one vote doesn't matter" actually gives me some moral leeway here. My one vote will not decide the election next year, and whether Obama wins or loses it will not be because of my actions. So I have the opportunity to vote my conscience. I know whoever I vote for will not win, but that's not my concern. I'm not running their campaign for them. All I can do is choose where to direct my vote, any money I wish to donate to a campaign, and any words for or against each candidate I feel like saying. My support is, given the vastness of the game, nigh-impossible to measure.

So I, in my insignificance, am free to act as I see fit without fear of guilt or reprisal.

I wish the game was different. I wish people cared about politics. I wish more people voted. I wish the Democrats listened to the Left. I wish actual progressives ran the Democratic party.

But that's not the world I live in, and for all the 'one man can make a difference' stories you hear, I accept that I'm not in a position to change a system so set in its ways.

*Despite, and I'm close to harping on this nonstop, his continuance (and in many cases expansion) of Bush's policies on indefinite detention, state secrets, quasi-legal military excursions and other acts falling under the umbrella of the War on Terror. For fuck's sake, Obama has authorized the assassination of American citizens away from any battlefield. Without charges, trial or due process. And people on the Right seriously think he's a liberal?

The Year in Crazy Part 84: White flag edition

2011-09-03T18:15:00.003-05:00

I barely slept at all last night. I had to wake up at 5. Then I walked an hour and a half to work. Then I worked a full eight hour shift. I'm exhausted and reliving memories of staff duty and just want to go to sleep and wake up sometime tomorrow morning, taking advantage of the fact that I won't have to go to work until around 3 in the afternoon (and then I have Labor Day off, hooray). But I have to stay awake because I'm doing laundry, and while playing Metallica is doing enough to keep me awake, it's doing just barely enough.

I'm tired. Too tired for this shit:

After weeks of Republican attacks on the Obama administration's tightening of environmental regulations, the president said Friday he would halt a planned increase in clean air standards.

In a statement released just hours after the U.S. Labor Department said the economy created no new jobs in August, Obama said he told Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson to withdraw the draft Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

While stressing his environmental record, Obama said he has "continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover."

He really won't fight for anything, will he?

And is anyone surprised by the Right's reaction?

“This action alone will prevent more job losses than any speech the President has given, and I hope he will listen to the bipartisan calls from across the country to address his administration’s negative impact on job creation,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement.

But [McConnell] also noted that “there are hundreds of regulations that even the administration acknowledges will cost America’s job creators billions of dollars.”
House Republican leaders plan to bring a suite of bills to the floor this fall that will delay or soften an array of rules from the Environmental Protection Agency and other departments.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) applauded the ozone decision and called it “a step in the right direction,” while signaling that the push to kill other rules will continue.

If you give them one thing they'll demand more. Isn't Obama a father? Has he had no hand in raising his children? He's had to establish boundaries at some point along the way, right?

I'm too tired to even get worked up over this. Laying in bed last night, unable to sleep, I thought about how George W. Bush was a colossal fuck-up who has failed at everything he's tried in and out of politics.

However... He is a sincere fuck-up. He believes in every bad decision he makes and he never apologizes for the consequences of anything. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Don't believe me? When he left office Bush's approval rating was about 34-35%, yet a little over a year later that 'Miss Me Yet?' billboard appeared. Just 13 months from even die-hard Republicans wishing Bush would disappear to the start of the retconning of his legacy.

And it has nothing to do with a sudden reappraisal of Bush's military leadership or handling of the economy or anything else. People still know there were no WMDs in Iraq, people still remember 'Heckuva job, Brownie," and people still know that Bush did not to halt or even slow the collapse of the housing market and other related economic disasters.

It all comes down to Bush being so damn stubborn. His refusal to admit he did anything wrong or made any mistakes. The lowest point of his administration? Being insulted by somebody else, unjustly he felt.

George W. Bush is so cocksure and unrepentant that others look up to him with awe. They're impressed on a visceral level, even if a voice of reason in their heads tries to make them see how colossal a fuck-up he was.

Because people will sooner forgive a man who fights passionately for the wrong thing to the end than they will one who fights for the right thing and gives up.

That is what Barack Obama needs to learn, and he needs to learn is right fucking now.

Best TV show, worst episode

2011-09-02T12:49:00.002-05:00

This week's question for the AV Club was "What are the worst episodes of your favorite shows?"

For some reason I feel like answering this myself, partly because the answer is so obvious: Stranger in a Strange Land. I'm not the only one to think this, I know, but I have to rag on it because it's almost like a parody. All the things people were complaining about up until then are on display here, almost to a ridiculous extent:

Piling up mysteries on top of each other: What did Juliet's mark mean? Who knows, they never returned to it.

Characters not exchanging information: Hey, Jack and Cindy remember each other! Do they say anything? Nope. It's just "Hey, Jack. What's up with you?" "Not much, just chilling in this cage." No "How are the Others treating you? Why are you living with them? They're killers!"

Pointless flashback stories: Did anyone care what Jack's tattoo meant? And then on top of it you bring in a quasi-mystical answer that you don't elaborate on and which, like Juliet's mark, means nothing as far as the big picture was concerned?

Season three was the weakest season overall, even with some great episodes, and it's crap like Stranger that's the reason for it. At least with Nikki and Paolo there was a reasoning behind their introduction, but Stranger really did nothing at all and had no reason to be. You can probably skip it and not miss anything from the overall story. It's the worst example of the producers indulging in their own ideas and throwing everything out there, exploiting the goodwill of the fans and testing their patience. When I eventually buy the boxset for the entire series (I have personal reasons for not having done so yet) I'll have to watch and see if anything made after this episode was so blatant; were there plot threads introduced and then forgotten about? Were there flashbacks that meandered and meant nothing in the long run? Maybe, if nothing else, the fan backlash against this episode got the producers to straighten up and focus on seeing the story though.

What did I tell you?

2011-09-01T20:48:00.004-05:00

Just yesterday I went off on how Obama won't fight for anything, and what do I read about when I get home from work? This.

In case you won't follow the link or don't know the story behind it, the White House contacted the Republicans about Obama giving a speech next week on the day Congress returns to session. The topic? Jobs. The number one issue right now, the issue that will most assuredly dominate the 2012 election.

Obama's already given the Right a talking point in delaying his speech at all, going off on vacation while the rest of us wait for him to... I guess 'lead' would be a bit generous there. So what would be a bad thing to do, to pile on top of "As soon as I get back from my vacation I'll get serious about the jobs issue. Super serious. Promise."? Delaying the speech.

And what would be worse than delaying the speech? Delaying the speech because it's scheduled for the same night as a Republican debate. Which is what Boehner wanted.

Would this have really been too hard?

Boehner: Mr. President, I just received word of your plans to address Congress next Wednesday concerning the economy, and I have to say this is inconvenient for us, as the Republican party has a debate scheduled for the same night. Why don't we do this on Thursday?

Obama: No, motherfucker, how about we do this Wednesday, as I just told you we're doing? I'm not asking your fucking permission here, OK? Bitch, we're not even a year out from the next election, so don't come to me with this weak-ass "We have a debate scheduled" bullshit. I'm the fucking President and I'm telling you now: you reschedule your fucking debate, because I'm addressing Congress on Wednesday, and I expect to see you there. Go ahead and test me on this, motherfucker, I dare you. I double dare you.

And if you need a new night for your debate, may I suggest sometime next January? You know, sometime in 2012, the actual fucking year of the actual fucking election? We're not paid to run endless campaigns, jackass, so you tell Bachmann and Paul to be there as well. I want to see all three of you sitting together, or all your asses belong to me.

And yes, I want Obama to use all those f-bombs. I want him to display some testicular fortitude. I want to see him push back against the Old Party on something, any-fucking-thing, and not knuckle under. The public has more respect for people that stubbornly stick to the wrong thing than they do people who push for the right thing and give up, and Obama was in the right here!

I'm done.

Odds and ends

2011-08-31T11:55:00.007-05:00

Just a couple random things that I don't feel deserve their own blogposts.

1) Is this serious?This is a Google ad I've seen a couple times in Reader. It strikes me as mal/spyware masked under something gullible people would want.

But the Buddy Christ? Seriously? The best explanation I can think of is that the non-English speaking would-be hacker who made this went to Google Image and searched for 'Jesus Christ,' then selected that image without understanding the context of it.

Except when I did searches for 'Jesus Christ' and 'Jesus Christ smiling' I didn't see any pictures of the Buddy Christ, so who really knows?

2) Speaking of Google Image... It's been over 16 months since I last talked about Wayne Stayskal, at one time the Shittiest Editorial Cartoonist in All the Land. I say one time because it's been at least a year since he last updated, and I have no idea if he's retired, deceased, or what. He's no longer listed on Gocomics.com, so I guess it's retired?

So who is now the Shittiest Editorial Cartoonist in All the Land? There are many deserving nominees, almost the entire industry makes Jay Leno look erudite and scathing in comparison.

But I nominate Ken Catalino, who I talked about a couple years ago but who has gotten worse as time goes on. At first glance he's as vapid as anyone else, but as you read more of his cartoons and get used to "style," you see that he is, quite possibly, the laziest asshole in an entire stable of lazy assholes. Here's a couple samplings from the past couple weeks.

It's not the lack of jokes or insight; Catalino is one of the few cartoonists to have a clear ideology, so I'll give him a point for that (even if the ideology is just 'Obama Derangement Syndrome'). But to sum up what really makes him stick in my craw, let me say one word:

Backgrounds.

He never uses them. Virtually all his cartoons take place in some Phantom Zone with a pink... mist? aura? surrounding everyone. Hell, it's innovation on the level of Citizen Kane's use of deep focus and forced perspective when Catalino includes a background or ground in general. (Look at that Dick Cheney one again. Look at the far right. Is that bone? Did Cheney vaporize the guy's torso and head?)

Lazy webcomic artists can rely on GIS to slap together complete panels, but Catalino is too lazy even for that!

This is why I say he's the new Shittiest Editorial Cartoonist in All the Land.

3) Barack Obama does not have my vote. I'm not happy with all he's accomplished so far since taking office, but more to the point I'm not happy with how he doesn't fight for anything liberal or progressive. And don't get me started on how he's handled civil liberties and the War on Terror. Is he as bad as McCain would have been? Probably not. But that doesn't mean he's any good.

And what annoys me is that even if he wins (which I expect will happen), it's still a victory for the Republicans, because even if the Democrats take back the House and gain in the Senate, no progressive agenda will come forth. Obama isn't going to come out on January 20th, 2013 and say "Now that I no longer have to worry about reelection, I can push forward on what really matters: an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, full marriage equality for gays and lesbians, a strengthening of the EPA, dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security, an end to wiretapping and extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention, criminal trials for those who used torture, and a higher tax rate on the wealthiest two percent and major corporations."

Barack Obama doesn't want any of those things. I'm not sure what he wants that I also want. There must be something, but will he fight for it? Will he stand up to the Republican party?

Fuck. No.

In 2009 Obama, with a Democratic Congress, could have come out swinging, fighting for and, dare I say, forcing the passage of groundbreaking legislation to undo the damage done by the Bush administration to America's economy, our liberties, and our standing in the world. He could have shamed the Republican party for their hard lurch further and further Right, and he could have shown the country the value of progressive ideals and the relative sanity of the Democratic party.

Did he? Did he take control of the conversation, did he set the parameters of the discussion, did he define who he was and who the Republicans were? No. Not at all. He let the other side paint him as un-American, anti-American, socialist, arrogant, elitist, naive, inexperienced, and whatever else you want to recall. He let the party that had just been trounced in two consecutive elections make demands, and whatever demands he didn't give into outright he entertained as valid.

He wouldn't and won't use the bully pulpit, he wouldn't and won't use his charisma and popularity to sway the public. He's less unlikeable than any Republican (or just about any), yet he can't get anything done because he won't use the tools at his disposal.

Either he is weak or he is uncommitted, and neither is a quality that should be found in a president.

Who will I vote for? I don't know. Maybe the Green candidate, maybe I'll write someone in. The only important thing is that I vote my ~~conscious~~ conscience (fixed), which means I vote for the person I feel is best suited for the office of the Presidency.

And Barack Obama is not him.

4) Much more immediate, fall is upon us. Yesterday it rained and the temperature has dropped dramatically. It's supposed to become hot and humid again on Friday, but as far as I'm concerned, the best season of the year is back. Leaves changing color, overcast weather, pumpkin-flavored food everywhere, chilly winds. I love it all.

What undermines it this year is that I'm stuck watching an opportunity pass by. Fall is the start of the JET application process, and I can't take part this year. The JET Program is an official program the Japanese government employs to bring native speakers to teach Japanese students foreign languages. For me that's English, obviously. I first learned about this over a decade ago, but only now do I think I would have a shot at being accepted for it. The government would pay for my travel and living expenses, plus a little extra for personal spending.

But I have bills, most troubling about $160 a month for Public Storage. Plus, I'm trying to pay off my Bank of America credit card so I can cut my ties with them completely. I don't, in other words, have the savings I would want to have before I try to move to another country for at least year, when I don't even know how much money I would be receiving each month. If I had a thousand dollars or something like that, I'd be more secure in applying and (best case scenario) making the move, because even if my monthly allowance isn't that much (and if I, being terrible at budgeting, need to dip into that buy food or other necessities) at least I'm still covered.

Living paycheck to paycheck right now, I'm hesitant to make any big leaps. And I know being accepted is not guaranteed, at all. But if I'm going to daydream, I'll daydream big.

Going to Japan is, for me, my biggest dream. And I want to do it right. I don't want to just go to Tokyo for a week or two and come back saying "Yeah, I've seen Japan." Because I haven't. I've just done the tourist stuff for a couple weeks.

Since I don't have a normal work schedule I don't have consistent paychecks. I get paid every other Friday, but I never know how much each check will be. I don't know how long it will take me to pay off my BofA card, let alone save up $1,000. I think I can get it all done before next fall, but I know I get distracted easily, I live in the moment too much. Can I actually stick to this plan, all for an unlikely outcome? Who knows?

But at the very least, saving a grand or two would be nice because then I can get serious about looking to move back to San Francisco. And that would make me very happy. I'm feeling homesick again lately.

The Year in Crazy Part 83

2011-08-30T10:34:00.005-05:00

Creationists and IDiots want to frame their argument as "teach the controversy." "There are just too many unanswered questions with evolution, and we want to teach the kids both sides so they can decide for themselves."

For the moment, nevermind that facts are not things to decide on. You either accept and understand them or you don't. The real problem is that they are (whether intentionally or not) casting doubt on virtually all of science. Certainly any science that conflicts with one's preconceived notions, such as evolution going against Genesis, or climate change going against... I don't know. That we can do whatever we want without having to suffer any consequences?

I mention this now because I want to show you what anti-science, anti-intelligence thinking leads to:

Megyn Kelly: I want to ask you this—does it matter, should it matter, if somebody is dumb?

Because you know, we've had—yes, there have been partisan attacks, no question, it does usually seem to focus on Republicans, is Michelle Bachmann dumb, they've talked about, you know, her being on the House Intelligence Committee is a contradiction in terms, and they've anonymously sourced Republicans asking that question, now they're asking this about Rick Perry, Sarah Palin—but is it unfair, just because it's coming from some in the mainstream media?

I mean, there were questions about the number of colleges Sarah Palin, you know, attended, there were questions about, you know Perry's academic transcript and so on, does it make it illegitimate just because of who's asking it?

America has an anti-intellectual streak to it. Earlier this morning I saw someone tweet a quote by Asimov: "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

But I would go just a bit farther, and say that many Americans view ignorance as superior to knowledge. Though they wouldn't call it 'ignorance.' No, they'd call it 'common sense' or 'being down-to-Earth' or 'anti-elitist.' Knowledge has come to mean elitism for a certain segment of the American population, and now, as was inevitable, we have people thinking that a lack of knowledge, a lack of higher education, a lack of interest and understanding of science and classic literature and any number of other subjects is a sign of being 'one of the people.' They're not intellectually stunted or incurious. They're not arrogant. No, they're one of the people.

And of course this has spread to the world of politics. It's not new; think back to 2000 and supporters of Bush saying things like 'He's the one I'd like to have a beer with.' But with Bachmann and Perry in the race and Palin hovering on the sidelines (though I don't think she has the determination to run), the entire Old Party succumbing to the anti-intellectual, anti-science demands of its base, the time has come for the Republican cheerleaders to start playing defensively.

"Does it matter if someone is dumb?"

This is just the start, I'll wager anything on that. As the Republican primary goes on, and especially once the general election starts and it's Republican vs. Obama the college professor, Obama the Constitutional scholar, things will heat up. There will be more and more anti-intellectual apologists in more and more blatant fashion.

"Does it matter if someone is dumb?"
"Does it matter if the President doesn't understand Constitutional law? They're not on the Supreme Court!"
"Does it matter if the President doesn't believe the Earth revolves around the sun? It's not the job of government to determine what is or is not scientific fact!"
"Does it matter if the President knows who the Prime Minister of Britain is? He has aides to remember the trivial stuff!"

Book 36: God, No!

2011-08-28T14:28:00.000-05:00

God, No! by Penn Jillette (B-)

Third post in one day. Somebody stop me, please!

It's not much of a criticism to say right off the bat this book is rather formless. Penn mentions in the introduction that it's going to be random and more a collection of stories than anything else. Even the general format of "An atheist's 10 ~~Commandments~~ Suggestions" isn't adhered to all that closely.

Back up.

Since sometime in the 90's I've been a fan of Penn & Teller, though for the first decade or so of that I simply knew them as "those magicians who sometimes appear on Comedy Central, and they were on the Drew Carey Show that one time. (And the Simpsons.)" Then right before I left for Basic Training I visited my dad and I saw the first couple seasons of Bullshit sitting in his collection, and he told me about the show. I specifically remember him mentioning the PETA episode, and how one of the officers/managers/who cares of the group uses medicine developed by animal testing. Absolute hypocrisy.

But right after that visit I went to Basic Training and less than a year later I was in Iraq, so it was actually a couple years before I had a Netflix account again and I remembered my dad's description of the show. Sometime in 2009 I watched the first six seasons straight through, loved them, bought them for myself, and P&T, probably more than PZ Myers (whose blog I had started reading in late-2008), were instrumental in me getting interested in the skeptic movement.

So I've only been a "real" fan of them for a couple years. But, in those couple years I've become a really big fan (no, I'm not complaining about my weight again; since I'm out of the Army and don't have to do PT tests and weigh-ins anymore I don't give a shit if I get fat) and I've following Penn's vlog and whatnot. I don't agree with him on everything (near as I can tell, he's more or less a straight-ticket libertarian, so on social issues he and I see eye-to-eye and on financial stuff, not so much), but his blase "say what I mean" tone (which isn't just a shock-jock style "Hey look at me being offensive!" for the sake of getting attention) is always amusing.

And now Penn (if he goes by his first name professionally then I'm calling him by his first name) has written a book and I've read it and now I'm talking about it. So getting back to the start of this post: this book is very loose. It jumps around from story to story and occasionally mini-rant about views political and (especially) religious in random fashion. There are some hints of consistency, such as a group of stories about his parents and sister in the latter middle, but mostly it's like "Hey, speaking of sex, here's a story about Ron Jeremy and the Supreme Court." The book is supposed to an atheist answer to the 10 Commandments, but the stories following the suggestion in place of "Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery" don't necessarily have to do with sex, marriage, or vows of commitment.

Or maybe every story did relate in some way and I just didn't see it. Nah, this isn't the Decalogue.

While there are exceptions, as to be expected with such a scattershot style, most of the stories are simply amusing but not particularly memorable. The book is never dull, but nothing in it has really stayed with me, probably because of the aforementioned looseness of the book as a whole. Any given anecdotes may be funny, but what am I supposed to take from it?

A rather big problem, one big enough that I have to mention it, is that he glides over political statements without really exploring or justifying them, and the impression grows that a lot of his libertarian views are based on gut instinct as much as (or perhaps a little more than) reasoned arguments. His assertion that taxes are "theft of money by force," for example, cries out for an explanation and sounds juvenile without one. "Why do I have to pay taxes? I didn't ask for you to build these roads or run a military or regulate the food industry so I don't eat toxic waste!"

But bigger than that, to me at least, is the subject of atheism and specifically Penn's argument that agnostics are just pussies who can't commit.

The basic problem with atheist arguments in general is that the question of 'god/God' inevitably refers to 'Judeo-Christian God of Abraham,' which carries with it conditions such as 'kind and loving,' 'knowable,' 'concerned with day-to-day goings on,' etc. The idea of an all-knowing/powerful/present deity who keeps a distance from humanity/the world isn't raised, probably because virtually no one identifies as believing in such a being, and because the question of a deity who does not interfere in the workings of this universe is, I admit, a moot point.

But it makes it difficult for me to care about explicitly atheist issues (as opposed to secular issues or church-state issues, which I do care about) when my (minority to the extreme) belief in a non-interfering deity/force is discounted outright and I'm either called a pussy for not being a full-blown atheist or I'm lumped in with the atheists as if the distinction I see between atheist and agnostic doesn't matter. And that's in effect in this book.

I agree with Penn and other atheists that religion causes a lot of problems. I understand the need and urgency of confronting the many problems of religion in society, its influence on American politics, its birthing of terrorist ideologies and bigotries sexual/gender/racial, and the unchallenged assertion that faith itself is a positive or admirable quality (I think I'll reread the early bit in The God Delusion where Dawkins raises the question "why should faith be automatically respected?", a question that has stuck with me since I read it). But I have always, and I expect will always, balked at the idea that all faith is unquestionably bad and that even the most liberal, benign, personal faith is the start of a slippery slope to jihad and creationism and gender inequality and so forth. I believe it is possible for people to have faith and to not be drawn into a view of the world that divides everyone into tribes or to suddenly desire to strip large swathes of the population of rights that everyone should have.

And while I want to avoid the "Atheists are just as fundamentalist as the religious" straw man argument, I am, all the same, turned off by what I see as an overbearing push from the atheist side that if you're not a full-fledged atheist then you're weak or wishy-washy or deluded or whatever. There is bullshit in that line of reasoning.

I'll end the rant there, but my view of the book is diminished just as my view of someone else's writing is diminished when they go overboard in drawing a line between 'rational' and 'deluded' or 'sane' and 'crazy.' I have seen atheists go too far in an 'us vs. them' view, which also contributes to my not wanting to be classified as an atheist.

But back to Penn's book... Actually, I think I've said all that I want to about it. Aside from the rambling, he's not as polished or as well-written as other authors. He's much more colloquial, which makes the book more accessible, but I think it also adds to the breezy, doesn't-stick-with-you feeling of it. After I finished this last night I started on Hitch-22, and the tone and everything else is so radically different there that I experienced literary whiplash. I only got a couple pages in, but the feeling of Hitchen's prose (I've never read any of his books before) has still stuck with me a day later.

This is not to dismiss Penn's writing (I doubt he'd feel insulted if I say he's not as good a writer as Dawkins or Hitchens), it's just an observation.

I wouldn't be surprised if full-on atheists were more charitable in their reviews of this book, but for me it's a mixed bag.

Books 33-35: For Science!

2011-08-28T13:18:00.000-05:00

Death from the Skies! by Phil Plait (B)
The Manga Guide to the Universe
The Manga Guide to Relativity

After writing far more than necessary about the Darth Bane books, it should be easier to discuss some books that have no real plot or character to cover.

Second and third first, the Manga Guides are in the same series as the ones I discussed last year, and my comments from that post can just be cut and pasted here. The stories and characters are merely serviceable, though I did like the play-within-a-story plot of the Universe volume. It's a step up from the other stories and their "Student must learn about subject to pass a class/impress a guy" plots, though the story is still revolving around "Student must learn subject to perform unrelated task." Brian Dunning has criticized the series for not telling stories that revolve around the application of, say, physics or molecular biology, and I have to agree. Though with the caveat that telling a story that is meant to teach basic principles while applying this information in some kind of real world setting (or a sci-fi setting like a spaceship or whatever) would be a difficult job to pull off.

And I liked how Universe started off with discussing the geocentric and heliocentric views of the solar system, and then went on to explain that many of the things we know about the universe today are counterintuitive to original thought because of how we view everything. It may not have been completely necessary, but I think it's a good touch to help bring in readers.

I think Relativity, notwithstanding the story and character problems mentioned above, also worked well because it was a relatively (no pun intended) simple and contained idea that works in the format. Biology and cosmology are rather big ideas, and those volumes could only really touch upon a bunch of ideas without going into that much detail. They're good as primers, but this volume felt more focused.

***

Onto Death from the Skies! (exclamation point required), which has the immediate problem that astronomy is not as interesting as biology.

But Plait makes a valiant effort to make the universe around us interesting, and Skies! has a workable formula in its focus on dangerous ideas as a way to grab your attention before moving onto calmer (and heavier) subject matters. I'm not a fan of the Mythbusters-style "blow shit up and sneak some science in" method; it's almost like they're tricking audiences into learning. But Plait does far more science and not so much about explosions/collisions, so I can forgive the sensationalism of the title and each chapter introduction.

On a related note, I'm not sure if the alien invasion chapter was really necessary or fits in with the book. He does try to break away from the standard mold of aliens invading to conquer or steal resources (though it would not have been remiss of him to mention that's an unlikely motivation to begin with, just to get it out of the way), but I think the whole chapter was there just for the spectacle. Aliens are more interesting than asteroids, after all.

The general sensationalism is actually undercut by Plait himself, but the fact that he acknowledges how unlikely most of the things are at the end doesn't diminish how interesting the reading was. Overall he did the right thing in using the worst-case scenarios as a springboard to introduce fundamental ideas like how stars work or how galaxies collide. When he gets down to the science he does well, particularly with the ever-present problem of trying to discuss vast expanses of time and space that go well beyond what the human mind is truly capable of conceiving.

But there is the fact that the book touches on a bunch of different things (asteroids, black holes, supernovas), and I'd say the book is kind of similar to the Manga Guides; a good introduction to a lot of ideas, it covers the general facts, but it's not a substitute for an actual class on astronomy.

Books 30-32: Darth Bane

2011-08-28T12:51:00.000-05:00

Path of Destruction
Rule of Two
Dynasty of Evil by Drew Karpyshyn (B)

Early in my blog I complained about the Star Trek reboot and said I hope it fails (which it didn't). My reasoning was

1) Star Trek is for geeks, and I hated that the new movie was being marketed for the masses. Fuck the masses. They get everything already. 99.99999% of movies and TV shows and books and music is made to appeal to the largest audience possible. Taking Star Trek, a franchise that had grown dear to a small section of geeks (obsessively dear, to some), and dumbing it down for people that couldn't give a shit about what the Prime Directive is or would complain about Captain Picard being boring because he doesn't leap to action at the first sign of danger (but, rather, commits the grave sin of thinking and reasoning) strikes me as little more than a "fuck you" to the Trekkies. Fuck you, we're taking this too.

2) Star Trek has been done. It's been around for almost 50 years now, with five TV shows and ten films and spin-off media out the wazoo. I don't want to see Kirk and Spock updated for modern audiences (see point above) and I don't want see them updated or redone period. I want new stuff. I want to see creators coming up with new worlds to explore and new characters for me to grow attached to. I like seeking out new things; last year I started watching Doctor Who, and earlier this year I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time. And it was refreshing to find new and interesting stories. There's a lot of stuff in both of those shows that's familiar, yes, but I don't know of many characters that are quite like the Doctor, and I don't know of many worlds that have countries as fundamentally different yet believable as the Fire Nation is to the Earth Kingdom.

It doesn't require too much to make a story that stands out on its own; just an element or two that's new, and for the story to follow through on these to their logical conclusion.

But Hollywood is afraid of new stuff. They want what's familiar and what's been proven to work because making a movie is a huge investment in time and money. The game has grown so large, the amounts of money so obscene for just one summer blockbuster, that Hollywood is effectively a collection of eunuch jellyfish. Everyone says they want to be Pixar, but nobody wants to risk anything.

But here I am, reviewing some Star Wars books. Is this fair?

NOPE!

Squee!

Yes, I'm a hypocrite for not constantly seeking out things I've never seen, for returning to a universe I've already enjoyed. If Star Trek has been done, then Star Wars is even worse.

But what can I say? I'm human. I'm flawed.

I love the Original Trilogy, and the only thing I love about the prequels is the Red Letter Media reviews. I've actually watched those reviews more times than I've watched many real movies. But I've always loved the Star Wars universe as a whole. Back in the 90's, when the Expanded Universe was first being developed and all the books and comics detailing what happened before and after the six movies were new, I read a few of the books. Pretty much all of them were de facto sequels to the OT, the further adventures of Luke, Han and Leia. At the time I enjoyed it, but as I've grown older I've kind of turned against it. Part of it is what's detailed in the RLM Revenge of the Sith review: a big problem with the entire prequel trilogy is that Anakin Skywalker is built up too much. The entire galaxy revolves around him, he's the centerpiece of this vague prophecy to destroy the Sith. Even when you have a galactic war between droids and clones going on, the focus is on Anakin being petulant and whining about not having enough power.

Looking back, that's kind of the problem with the EU books set after Jedi: everything has to be about Han, Luke and Leia, or their children. I understand the logic here: go with the familiar. But when you have an entire galaxy for your setting, and however many trillions of beings as a cast, I think the better thing would be to try to expand your scope.

So when I recently became interested in revisiting the EU, I decided I'd more or less stick to the pre-movies era (though I'll be rereading Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy at some point, the books that resuscitated the entire EU idea to begin with). I'd look at the history of the Galactic Republic and how things built up to the decaying-from-within system that's the setting of Phantom Menace, when things were ripe for Palpatine to rise to power. No OT heroes or their children hogging the spotlight.

The Darth Bane trilogy caught my attention because I had already known that the "Rule of Two" idea touched upon in Phantom Menace came from Bane. Sort of a big moment in Sith history, so that sounded interesting.

The trilogy (which I've graded as one work, since it was presumably always intended to be a trilogy) covers 20 years as we see Bane's rise to Sith Master and his eventual overthrow by his apprentice. All three books suffer from biopic-itis, that problem movies about actual people suffer from: you only have 90-120 minutes cover a person's life, so you're more or less restricted to focusing on the big events and simplifying things that took longer to happen than you have time to illustrate.

In the first book this isn't too bad, because it covers quite a bit of ground. The plot starts with Bane, originally named Des, a miner on a backwoods planet. He accidentally kills a Republic soldier and has to hide, which he does so by joining the Sith army in their fight against the Republic. Flashforward a couple years and Des' intuitive abilities have made him a sergeant and led his squad through incredibly dangerous missions that should have, by all rights, wiped them out. When he disobeys an order and strikes his superior he's arrested, but word of his accomplishments has caught the attention of one of the Sith Masters, and he's brought to the Sith academy to study the ways of the Force.

He rises as a student quickly, suffers a couple setbacks, and begins to question the prevailing notion that the Sith could all coexist as equals. He leaves the school and finds some ancient Sith teachings, which convince him the Sith, guided by a lust for power and the dark side, could never achieve true power when they were plentiful. He creates the Rule of Two, one master and one apprentice, and uses a final confrontation between the Sith and the Jedi in their years-long war as the chance to wipe out the rest of the Sith, masters and students, as well as a bunch of Jedi.

Then the epilogue has Darth Bane, the last of the Sith, stumble upon a young girl with tremendous potential and he takes her as his apprentice. I'm simplifying that last part a bit, but it really does come out of nowhere. I guess when your setting includes a mystical power that can guide destiny you can excuse credulity-straining events with a handwave (It was the will of the Force).

So yeah, the first book runs through a lot of stuff, introducing a lot of characters and locations as Des the miner grows to become Darth Bane, sole Sith Master. It has an epic feel, never getting too bogged down with personal stories (like Des' rivalry with a fellow student) or the larger story (the Sith-Jedi war).

Unfortunately things fall apart in the second book, which picks up right when Darth Bane finds the young girl and names her Darth Zannah. A good chunk of the book is them wandering around the planet after Bane's plan to exterminate the Sith has worked, with the story's focus also jumping to a couple Jedi dealing with the clean-up of the war's end. Then the story skips ahead 10 years and we catch up on Bane, Zannah, the Jedi, and we see events play out and lead to a confrontation between the Sith and the Jedi, which the Sith win.

The book is structured such that the story is focusing on the characters we're introduced to in the first few chapters and we're following them until the battle that serves as climax to the book. This is when the biopic-itis I mentioned above is at its worst. Everything we're shown in the story is what is related to the story itself, namely a few Jedi finding out the Sith still exist and reacting to this information. There's a little bit of nothing of Zannah helping foster a separatist movement (I assume this is an intentional echo of Palpatine's plan in the prequel trilogy), but neither Bane nor Zannah grow or change as a result of this aside. The only real change that happens is that Bane is 'infected' with a parasitic creature called orbalisks that create a nigh-impenetrable armor around his body, and then at the end of the book it's removed to save his life. The plot thread there doesn't really amount to anything in the end.

The biggest problem I have with the second book is that we skip over virtually all of Zannah's training. Similar to what's mentioned in the Red Letter Media reviews, that we never got to see Anakin's training and how he and Obi-Wan actually became friends, we don't get to see much of Zannah going from 10 year-old orphan to 20 year-old Sith. A couple attempts are made to show Zannah struggling with actually being heartless and cruel as is necessary to be a Sith, but they're handled in a perfunctory, almost obligatory, manner.

This makes sense in that it's Darth Bane's story, but from the first book we the readers and Darth Bane himself know that his end will come when his apprentice will challenge and kill him to prove they have overtaken him in power. Zannah is just as important to the story as Bane is, but she's only ever treated as a supporting character.

Which opens another problem in that once Bane becomes the last surviving Sith Master in the first book he settles into wheel-spinning in books two and three. Most of his page-time in the second and third books is him tracking down ancient 'holocrons,' founts of knowledge made and left behind by Sith Masters long past. He's still presented as a student, and we don't get to see much of him as a teacher.

The third book doesn't cover as much ground as the first book either, but it's an improvement over the second one as the action picks up and the saga of Darth Bane reaches the inevitable climax.

With the third book Bane is still trying to find ancient knowledge, this time a purported secret to immortality since he's starting to suspect Zannah will either never challenge him for supremacy (meaning she's unworthy to be a Sith) or she's waiting for his body to deteriorate so she can beat him with a minimum of effort (which means she's unworthy to become the Master).

Zannah, for her part, is intent on killing Bane, but first she's trying to find an apprentice so she can continue the cycle when she become the Master. And among all this there's someone from Bane's past seeking revenge against him. A couple new characters are introduced who can serve as potential apprentices when either Bane or Zannah is destroyed, and the final third of the book, the two-part battle between Bane and Zannah, really works because it's not clear how things will play out. It ultimately does play out as you might expect (it did as I expected, at least), probably because these are straight-forward action stories and there's little room for unexpected twists, but it's still very enjoyable in the moment.

My only real complaint with the third book is that it ends with two cliffhangers; but perhaps Karpyshyn is planning on writing a sequel trilogy.

***

As literature these books are simply workmanlike. Karpyshyn doesn't have a unique voice like William Gibson and he doesn't try to enrich the worlds with unnecessary tangents the way Stephen King or Neal Stephenson do, but there's nothing terrible about the prose. I've complained already about the biopic-itis and the regrettable decision to not show Zannah-as-student and Bane-as-teacher, but with the first and third books being as enthralling as they are, they overcome the weakness of the second book.

The trilogy also avoids a fear I hadn't really articulated to myself before I read it, but which was present nonetheless: the idea that it would be a bunch of fan-wanking. Returning to the RLM reviews again, the point is raised that the prequels are weighted down with tons of references and shout-outs to the original trilogy, solely for pleasing the fanboys. Look, it's Chewbacca! Look, it's Boba Fett!

Because the Darth Bane books take place a full millennium before A New Hope, it was clear there wasn't going to be anything that blatant. But there are things the series could have relied on just for the "Ooh, neato!" factor, like flashy lightsaber fights or Wookies appearing for no reason. To his credit Karpyshyn doesn't do this; he incorporates the lightsaber battles into the story properly, going so far as to explaining how Bane uses the different schools of swordsmanship, and how Zannah (due to her size and double-bladed lightsaber) relies on a defensive school to wear down her opponent. There's some thought put into that, and the books have no real "jiggle a shiny thing in front of a baby" quasi-condescension.

Again, not great literature, but the books were enjoyable and pretty much what I'd want in a Star Wars-based action saga.

Book 29: Order of the Stick extras

2011-08-23T12:52:00.002-05:00

Order of the Stick vol. D: Snips, Snails and Dragon Tales by Rich Burlew (B)

Early last year volume 4 of Order of the Stick was released and I was shameless in my praise for it, and I still stand by what I wrote. OotS is still, easily, my favorite webcomic, even if the current storyline hasn't been as breathlessly engaging as volumes 3 and 4. I mentioned last time that the Therkla/Kubota story was refreshing in that it didn't relate to the Order or their Snarl-related quest, and it showed that other things were going on in the world unrelated to them. Still, the current plot with Elan's dad hasn't really gripped me, and the reappearance of Nale and his Guild needs to go somewhere if it's going to be worthwhile.

And but so anyway, this volume I'm reviewing now isn't strictly related to the comic itself. It's a collection of standalone strips Burlew did for Dragon magazine (which I take to have been the official publication of D&D?) until its end, plus some filler material including:

-A brief comic adventure featuring Julio Scoundrel
-A battle between the Order and their 4e counterparts
-Some Treehouse of Horror-style retellings of fairy tales, James Bond and Hamlet.

All-together the book is slim and never really demanding. Since none of this can tie directly to the webcomic and its storyline, these are all basically bonus features meant for just the diehard fans. Taking them in turn,

-The Julio Scoundrel story is fluff, but it's entertaining fluff while it lasts. It starts in media res with one adventure and quickly moves to another, no pausing for proper exposition or plotting. The subtle change in art style (making it more three-dimensional) is handled well, but the story I can take or leave.

-The Dragon comics themselves are more or less funny, but for the most part they rely heavily on game mechanics and not characterization or the comic's actual plot, meaning they didn't work for me as much as they would someone who has actually played D&D.

-This applies even moreso to the 3.5e vs 4e storyline. I neither know nor particularly care about the differences between the respective classes in each edition, but being a fan of a battle/action sequences that rely on showing the actual strategy of one/both sides (as opposed to just showing people swinging swords or shooting bullets until most are dead) I appreciated Burlew's plotting of the fight.

-The Fractured Fairy Tales are the closest thing to the comic itself, with a lot of the humor coming from the characters and how they interact; something the Dragon comics had to avoid. These are arguably the best of the bunch, but they don't raise the collection above "for fans only" status.

NaNoWriMo in August Day 17 and end

2011-08-17T20:17:00.003-05:00

Words needed: who cares?
Words written: who cares?

No, I haven't given up on my latest NaNoWriMo attempt. I actually have ideas for future stories featuring the characters and I'd love to try to develop this into an ongoing series. If I could finish this book first, of course.

Last time I talked about this I mentioned I was in the middle of 7 straight days of being scheduled to work (I use that qualifier because on the fourth day I got sick and had to leave work early) and coming out of a period of heightened depression/fatigue/anxiety/homesickness/horniness (no, that last one isn't a joke; I was yearning to get back to San Francisco AND was questioning if I would ever do anything with my life AND was masturbating much more often than normal (you wanted to know)). I hope it's understandable that dealing with all that made the prospect of sitting down and trying to push forward with a story whose path had become a sticky morass less than appealing.

But that only covers to last Tuesday. I had Wednesday off, worked Thursday and Friday, had Saturday and Sunday off, worked Monday and Tuesday, and I had today off. What's my reason for not getting back to the book as soon as I could? I have none. I just have some excuses: catching up with online stuff, unwinding, reading, playing San Andreas. It's pretty amazing that I haven't actually lost all of my passion for the story.

It's not all bad, though. I work the next three days, and Friday and Saturday are going to be all day affairs. Sunday is my next day off, and I have less hours next week than I've had the past couple, so I should be getting back into writing every day soon enough, even if not everything I write is solid stuff that won't get cut when edits start.

So that's one problem, my not actually writing, and I can fix it soon enough. The other big problem, the enabler of the first problem, is grappling with where the plot is going and how I'm going to wrap it all up. Some good news on that front is I think I've come up with a possible solution. I don't like it too much, because it involves introducing a third party to the story around Act III, and that just smacks of padding; unless I want to extend the story even longer than it's turning out to be now, but that still feels like padding.

What matters is that I get writing again, and I've got a basic idea of how to get going again, how to get the two main characters back together and working towards resolving the situation somehow. I should focus on that, just get going and let inspiration come from that.

Books 27-28: Fables

2011-08-17T17:57:00.004-05:00

Fables: Witches
Fables: Rose Red by Bill Willingham et al (B)

Last year I caught up with Fables after the main storyline of the series, the tension between the expatriate fables and the Adversary, was settled on the surface. The Adversary (I don't want to spoil the revelation of their identity) was deposed, their empire left in shambles, and something akin to peace declared. The volume immediately following the end of the war introduced a new Big Bad in the form of Mister Dark (in that he's the main villain, but not really much of a manipulator or delegator), but then the next volume was distracted by the Fables/Jack of Fables crossover where Snow White and Bigby took care of Jack's ongoing story with the Literals.

With volumes 14 and 15 (these two) the focus returns back to Mister Dark and his (incredibly slow, apparently) plan to build a castle where Fabletown had been. I say incredibly slow because over the course of the two volumes Beauty turns out to be pregnant and gives birth around the same time that Frau Totenkinder challenges Mister Dark to 1-on-1 combat. I've said before one of the things (the thing, actually) that drew me to Fables is that things progress and change, but that's not always true. Sometimes things move pretty quickly, such as Snow White's pregnancy, but then things slow down (how long have Snow and Bigby's children been a few years old?). Which is distracting when several seasons pass and Mister Dark is still ordering around zombies to build his castle. I can understand that on the fables side they need time to deal with the arrival of Mister Dark, the burgeoning cult of Boy Blue, Rose Red's depression and the Adversary's attempts to seize power, and thus the villain needs to be distracted with something else.

The problem the story faces, and which I fear will continue as long as Mister Dark is the main villain, is that the threat he poses is nowhere near as defined nor wide-reaching as the Adversary's empire was. The story has gone from a mysterious leader of a massive empire with countless soldiers and magicians under their control to a single character whose powers aren't very well-defined (by dint of him being more of an idea than a specific character). His only goal is revenge against the fables, and thus he's a lone threat (as powerful as he is). The fables are dealing with an unknown property and they have limitations (there's a nice aside when King Cole points out that the loss of their New York town means the loss of their finances, which means potential problems in keeping their existence hidden from the mundies), but you can only have the heroes lost and confused for so long before it gets annoying, and volume 15 ends right at the limit of that. Peeking at the Wikipedia page for the series it doesn't look like a second encounter with Mister Dark has happened yet, which is not a good sign.

Also, Witches shows us Bufkin, trapped in the lower levels of Fabletown's old offices/library/artifact warehouse (which is apparently either its own dimension or located somewhere outside of New York City), dealing with Baba Yaga, and there's a two-parter checking in on Flycatcher's kingdom. The stories are both interesting, but as with the Mister Dark main attraction the series just isn't firing on all engines. I wouldn't say it's spinning its wheels, entirely, because the series has never been tied down to an overarching plot; while the Adversary's power and threat was the main conflict of the first several volumes, there were stories on Prince Charming's run for mayor or a reporter stumbling upon the existence of the fables. So it's not that I want Mister Dark to be front and center in every story. But as I said above he's not as major a villain as the Adversary, nor is his character one of sitting back and sending others to do his job. Volume 15 ends with Mister Dark (apparently) finding out where the fables have run off to, so logically he should be making some move against them sooner rather than later.

It probably sounds like I'm ragging on the latest volumes, but the good stuff I like about the series is there, the characters and humor and smart, rather grounded writing. It's just... the series is kind of falling into the trap of having lost its big villain, one of its best heroes (Boy Blue) and some interesting side characters (Prince Charming, Hansel, Jack, and now Frau Totenkinder) and now it's lost much of its direction. Even something that's supposed to be big, like Rose Red's history and her coming out of her depression to take control of the Farm again, hasn't led anywhere.

The Worst People in the World?

2011-08-16T11:39:00.004-05:00

Read the title and you immediately think of Hitler or Stalin or any other mass-murdering, raping, pillaging psycho who destroyed the lives of millions or potentially billions of people directly or indirectly. (How many people died in World War II, plus the people wounded grievously but not fatally, plus the widows and children left behind, plus the people that died because of a lack of resources, plus all the other victims of the war and its far-reaching effects? WWII potentially did ruin billions of lives with its immediate effects and fallout.)

So to call the people in this article the worst people in the world is clearly hyperbole, don't take it at face value. Although... I would like to mention that at least Hitler and Stalin and other mass-murdering psychos are motivated by some kind of passion and desire to accomplish something beyond themselves. Their intentions were wrong in the full definition of the word, but compare that to those two on Facebook and their back and forth "I'm ignorant and proud of it, I'm an asshole and proud of it."

What are those two motivated by in this conversation? All they're doing is insulting a man because of a physical handicap and trying to tear down his accomplishments because either

a) They just hate people that are different than them or
b) Hawking's accomplishments easily dwarf anything those two will do in the course of their lives and they realize that, and so they take a defensive stance of "Well who cares what you've done? You're in a wheelchair and I'm not, so there!"

'Childish' doesn't measure up to what these two are, because even children understand empathy and respect. But also, more importantly, children have curiosity and a desire to learn. Only adults turn against knowledge and new information out of distrust or animosity, only adults are shrouded in their own ignorance and limited view of the world.

Which is why, as horrible as Melanie and Kevin are, I don't entertain any ill-will towards them. I don't want to see them paralyzed as a form of ironic/karmic punishment, nor do I wish them to suffer unduly because of their desire to stay stupid and ill-informed.

They'll do that to themselves, because they want to stay stupid and ill-informed.

Kevin expends a lot of words to say nothing more than "What Hawkings et al have learned doesn't affect me, so who cares?" Never having met Kevin (and I would consider my life richer if I never do) I can only guess about his life and his mindset, but I think I can make an educated guess. For Kevin, knowledge is only useful if it has a direct and personal application. Making beer more malty or capable of staying cool longer is valuable, because beer is important to Kevin. Understanding the origins of the universe, the inevitable end of the Sun, or anything else "out there" is useless because it's "out there," and I suspect that for Kevin and Melanie "out there" is anything outside of their circles of family and friends and their jobs. The war in Afghanistan, the suffering in Somalia and the uprising in Syria are all "out there," as theoretical as a black hole trillions of light-years away.

And their fate, the inevitable path their lives will take no matter what jobs they get, whether they get married and/or have children, or any other variable you want to think of, is for "out there" to become greater and more confusing for them. They are ignorant today, they will be ignorant tomorrow, and as they grow steadily fatter, drunker, and angrier at a world that failed to give them everything they felt they had coming to them, "out there" will become bigger, more prevalent, and more insistent in reminding Melanie and Kevin of how little they know and understand.

Right now they don't care. If, somehow, they found this blogpost and had the wherewithal to follow the link above, read the Facebook statuses and realize I am talking about them, they might struggle and try to pound on their keyboards something resembling a rebuttal to me. Something like "Ha ha1 Whatever. Your a foggot. Who cares about gay science crap. Here's a real question: why can't you get a girlfriend? I may not know anything about guantum mechanics but I know how to get laid. fuck off u whiney bitch." And then they'll pat themselves on the back, get another beer, and prepare for a night of getting shitfaced, because there is little else in life for them at this point. Nothing I've said here will resonate with them, and I acknowledge this.

But I'm not writing this in the vain hope of reaching them and making them understand that yes, Stephan Hawking is a brilliant scientist and his work has influenced other advances in physics and astronomy, or to make them see how petty and cruel they are for taunting a man for his physical handicap. I don't believe they can be made to learn how small their mind is that they would dismiss decades of scientific thought with a "What does that matter to me?"

I'm writing this just to express my belief that they are building their own punishment, day by day, by consigning themselves to a lifetime of disappointment, frustration, and a shrinking worldview through their own choice of ridiculing knowledge.

Let me step back a minute and point out that I'm not claiming that their lives will be pathetic wastes compared to mine on the merits of accomplishment. I'm working a quasi-full-time job at a retail location, living in a medium-sized city in the Midwest, single, barely keeping my head above water in financial matters. As far as accomplishments go, I've done a few things many others have not, and I haven't done a few things that many others have. I'm not a hyper-rich or uber-successful person who can look down on the vast majority of humanity with a contemptuous sneer and a "Why don't they do something with themselves?"

It's not accomplishment that I'm basing this on. It's perspective. It's outlook. And yes, I will say with no hesitation or certainty that I am better than Kevin and Melanie because I have a better outlook than them. Now let me explain:

Today's Tuesday. Kevin and Melanie go to work or school or both, they go through their normal routine. At the end of the day they go home, watch TV, maybe drink, and go to sleep. Wednesday becomes Thursday becomes Friday, and then it's two days of partying and drinking and sleeping off hangovers. Monday comes around and the cycle begins again. Their lives are a pendulum swinging from "Kill enough time until my responsibilities are out of the way" to "Live it up hedonist-like and who cares about tomorrow?"

Then sooner or later Kevin gets a girl pregnant, or Melanie gets knocked up during a drunken night at a frat party, or let's just make it easy and say that Kevin gets Melanie pregnant. Either she won't get an abortion or they live in a state where it's prohibitively difficult to get one, and she decides to keep the baby. Pressured into doing the honorable thing (though he resents it every step of the way), Kevin marries Melanie. His part-time job at the garage or video store where he works with his friends and spends half the time goofing off has to be traded in for a 9-5 job that has health insurance and pays enough for the mounting cost of Melanie's pregnancy and the inevitably born child (since this is a fantasy let's skip over the difficulty that a college drop-out with a spotty employment record would face in this current winter economy). Kevin still resents being made to grow up but like most anyone else he has enough affection for his child that he pushes himself to get through this period. Maybe in the back of his mind he convinces himself that he can somehow, someday, go back to the way things used to be.

Melanie, meanwhile, has dropped out of school to become a full-time housewife. She's short-tempered when it comes to the baby that won't stop crying and needs to be changed every fucking hour, but like Kevin she has something of a maternal streak and this prevents her from just running out on her new family. But she resents this all the same.

For Kevin life is now "get up, go to work, come home, try to enjoy yourself a little if that bitch will just let up for five fucking minutes." More and more, "enjoy himself" can only mean watching TV and drinking beer. He no longer makes it to the gym or to the park to play football with his friends, he's spending five days a week sitting in a cubicle, and those beer are rather high in calories. Melanie has lost some of her pregnancy weight, but there's still a bit of pudge in her belly. Spending all day at home with the baby, watching TV, and progressively snacking more and more, her body suffers the same fate as Kevin's. But since they're both still young their metabolisms are working well enough, and any changes are slow and readily ignored.

A year or two after the baby is born Melanie gets pregnant again. Their finances aren't doing so poorly that this is the most terrible thing possible, but it puts a consistent amount of stress on both them and their bank account. Kevin continues at the job he hates, things get more stressful for Melanie at home, and this means more drinking and more snacking for them both. Melanie doesn't lose the weight from her second pregnancy, Kevin is becoming noticeably fat, and it's obvious to both of them that they're stuck. In their minds they're now too old (even if they haven't reached 30) and too fat to find anyone else. Their marriage and homelife simply give them stability and familiarity, but no satisfaction.

The years pass. They do the things parents are supposed to do but the familial bonds are more obligations for them than adventures or joyful experiences. There's no overt hostility between them or towards their children, but whatever happiness they feel is ephemeral, lasting only in the moment and forgotten quickly enough when it has passed. The children grow up and start school, Kevin gets a promotion or two at work, but his salary never takes a significant bump. Maybe they can buy a new car every few years or take a trip to Disneyworld while the kids are still young enough to enjoy it.

Kevin and Melanie are no longer attracted to each other physically, and haven't been for a long time. Each contemplates affairs, but Melanie is tied to her house and never meets someone that might be interested, and when Kevin tries to make a move on a young coworker he realizes what he took to be flirtation was just regular friendliness. Embarrassed, he makes it a point to avoid her for the next couple weeks.

When the kids are teenagers and the topic of college first becomes real the years of resentment and frustration begin bubbling to the surface. For whatever reason (for the kids, because they don't think they can find someone else) they stay together, but things become colder and more distant, and in time they can spend hours in the same room and not say a single word to each other.

The kids graduate high school and maybe they go to college on a scholarship (Kevin's salary is quite enough to cover their costs) or maybe they get a job and move out. The kids might get married and have children of their own and if so they'll visit at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but because it's expected and not because anyone is overjoyed at seeing their family.

Kevin dies in his early 60's, before he can retire. His children attend the funeral service and then move on with their lives. Melanie takes the life insurance and moves to Florida, whiling away the next couple decades until she dies in her sleep one day. Again, her children bury her and say goodbye, and then move on.

Now I admit right away I've painted a rather bleak picture here. Is it the bleakest possible? Oooooooooooh no, not by a longshot. But I think it's rather probable. It probably gets played out rather often in our world, and Kevin and Melanie strike me as the kind of dullard who lives their life being directed by circumstances and doing just what they need to in order to get by, nothing more.

You might say I didn't lay out how the issue of their worldview is their punishment, and yes, I didn't make it explicit. But it's there, between the lines. The fact that Melanie and Kevin have no curiosity - none whatsoever - is what makes this above scenario both possible and so terrible. If they had passion for anything real, be it culture or art or science or history or whatever, then the curveballs of an unexpected pregnancy or an unfulfilling job could be weathered and life could still have meaning.

But they don't have any passion. They may say to themselves that life is simply meant to be lived, but when you no longer have the option of partying and getting wasted every weekend, of devoting all your time to your own immediate gratification, what steps in to take their place? Maybe I'm wrong and one or both of them would throw themselves into parenting fullforce, and their life would have meaning there. I doubt it, though. They strike me as the type of person that has to be experiencing something themselves, such an orgasm or a buzz, to enjoy it.

How I am different?

I'm curious. I learn, I explore, I find new things. My horizons are always open and distant and no matter what happens in my life, no matter what setbacks I endure, the world, the universe, will still be a great big, beautiful place to explore. I can look outside myself and find meaning in the realization that I am not the end all and be all of creation and that the world is not here to entertain and pleasure me. I could end up in an unhappy marriage and a job I hate and I would still be ever awed. For Melanie and Kevin, the world will continue to shrink until their horizons are so close they can touch them with an outstretched hand. They may in fact become increasingly hostile to the rapidly changing world, drawing further into themselves as new technologies develop that they don't understand, or new discoveries are made that, on a fundamental level, make them feel even smaller.

And that's the difference: as I am made to feel insignificant it is because I realize there is far more out there to behold, and as they are made to feel insignificant it is because they think there is less for them.

So no, I don't wish any ill upon them, because they will receive it of their own volition.

They are Melanie and Kevin. That is their crime, and that is their punishment.

Quick question

2011-08-13T19:33:00.003-05:00

So Ron Paul came in second in the Iowa straw poll. That means he's now the second-leading Republican candidate, right? I mean, it's not like the media and/or conservative pundits can talk up Bachmann for coming in first while at the same time writing off Paul as a momentary diversion who only appeals to a fringe group, right? Because that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?

The Year in Crazy Part 82

2011-08-12T12:05:00.002-05:00

Just to show I'm not dead. I'm sure you've already seen this:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) just completed a damaging campaign stop in Iowa where audience members responded angrily to his plans, and Romney frequently responded belligerently to their anger. In one of the most contentious exchanges, Romney defended his belief that we “should consider a higher retirement age” for Social Security and Medicare to preserve tax breaks for corporations:
ROMNEY: There’s various ways of [preserving Social Security and Medicare’s solvency]. One is we could raise taxes on people. That’s not the way . . .
AUDIENCE: Corporations! Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend.
AUDIENCE: No they’re not.
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?
AUDIENCE: It goes into your pocket!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings, my friend.

Is Romney trying to run some kind of Springtime for Hitler plan where his campaign is supposed to implode?

Also, I'd like to just mention that coming back to Twitter after a week off (which I'll go into in another post this weekend) to find a bunch of easy jokes about Romney's gaff kind of makes me eager to just stop following the news. It's not just that there's no good news or that one person can't affect real change, it's that the game that's being played, the cycle that we're all stuck in, is so boring and unsatisfying on all levels, as evidenced by several intelligent, knowledgeable bloggers clogging my Tweetdeck with "Take a phrase with the word 'people' and replace it with 'corporations.'" It's not just that I don't care; it seems no one does.

Or maybe it's just that August is always a dead month in terms of news and things will get more interesting in a while.

NaNoWriMo in August Day 4 Report

2011-08-06T08:54:00.000-05:00

Words needed: 6,451
Words written: 6,511

I'm just barely keeping up with the daily word counts. I mentioned at the end of July that I had reached a point in the story where I wasn't sure how to proceed. I spent the first day rewriting the opening scene, and then the next couple days I hit the word count but was barely making any progress with the story. It was just a couple conversations, one of which I'll be cutting entirely later. Last night I finally got to a bit of action that will move the plot forward and I can try to move on.

But at the same time I've started working on a short story idea I had, completely unrelated to the book but something to keep me writing each day so I don't get out of the habit (the trap I fell into the last two times I've done this).

The problem is now that I've moved well into Act II and have to start thinking about how things will wrap up, I'm more hesitant about what should happen. I've introduced a bunch of different twists and mysteries and now it's time to make sure they're all answered by the end, so instead of being able to come up with any new thing I want, I need to play out what I already have to its conclusion. It's a bit constraining, but not terribly.

What doesn't help at all, though, is that I've been trying to work through some mild depression and other distracting emotions over the past few days. It's really sapped my will to work, which is compounded by the fact that I've had to work the past three days and I'm working today and the next three days after that. Just knowing that I'm working seven days straight has been a bit exasperating.

But, I keep pushing on. Even last night, when I was ready to call it a night with a few hundred words to go I just kept going until I had passed the day's par. I'm hoping if I can just keep at it during this trying bit I'll come out of it with my momentum intact and I can keep going until I finish the book. Though maybe I'll wait a week or two before I get into the rewrites.

NaNoWriMo in July Day 30 Report

2011-07-31T22:27:00.003-05:00

Words needed: 50,000
Words written: 50,110

Last night, the 30th, I stopped writing with less than 1,200 words to go. Since I had today off I knew there'd be little standing in my way of hitting 50K count except for the possibility of not starting to write until late in the evening. Which is kind of what happened.

But the real challenge was my first true bout of writer's block during this go-round. I knew what needed to happen next, but I couldn't get the conversation I was writing to build up to it. Briefly, Val, one of my heroines, has formed a quasi-working relationship with a special military taskforce, but I needed to get her to leave them and go after Katrina, who is still stuck in another universe. The military leader is having none of that since he has his own orders and the situation is too risky, and I needed Val to say "Stuff your orders" and teleport out of there (it all makes sense in context).

The problem is I couldn't just have Val say "We need to go save Katrina from possible danger" (which is what she assumes is happening), and then the General says "No, we're not doing anything yet," and Val says "Well screw you." Exit stage, end scene.

And since I'm becoming more self-aware of how I fall into the habit of writing conversations that just go over what has happened or what could happen, I was playing it very careful to have an actual conversation take place leading to Val leaving. What I wrote wasn't perfect, but it'll do until I start on the rewrites.

Which is becoming something of a recurring problem itself. I went into this without any outline, just some notes, and as I get further into the story and introduce new characters and discover what the overall plot is, I realize there are more and more things I've already written that will need to be changed to fit with the story as it is turning out. I'm not worried about how much trouble this will be when I do go back and do it, but as I said last time, these loose wires are bothering me.

But the real problem right now is that I've still got the two main characters separated, and while I know how to get them back together and where the plot will go from there, I'm stuck as to how to get it to happen. Val is about to appear at the site of the interdimensional teleportation device, but there's still a group of soldiers there. I need for her to get them out of there for at least a couple minutes so that she has enough time to operate the device and send herself to the other universe of the story, which I've established will take a couple minutes.

And I don't know how to do that.

Meanwhile, I need to figure out a way to get Katrina in harm's way or in some kind of bad situation for a while, just to delay her and Val meeting up again for a little while longer. In her story thread she's become involved in an attempt to root out a conspiracy among the Reptoids, so I figure the traditional thing is for the conspirators to put her in some kind of prison (I've already established the Reptoids had kidnapped some humans to use as test subjects while creating their virus). But it seems a bit too obvious for me, so I'm not entirely sold on that idea just yet.

If this was the last day of November I'd consider taking tomorrow and possibly Tuesday off, just to get some time away from the story. But the NaNoWriMo people have set up August as its own month for writing as well, so I'm thinking I'll use their word counter as incentive to keep writing into the next month. I don't expect I'll be able to write another 50,000 words if I stick to just this story, but who knows? Maybe the story will be that long, maybe a little longer, maybe less. We'll see.

As it is, I think I'll spend the next couple days trying to rewrite the opening of the story. I was never satisfied with how Val and Katrina met (the actual meeting was fine, but what came before and after didn't work for me) so I guess this gives me an excuse to go back and deal with that now. It'll still count towards my word count.

Sympathy for the Devil

2011-07-29T18:51:00.001-05:00

I couldn't resist using this as the title, even if the point of this post is to kind of, sort of explain why the Star Wars prequels were doomed from the start and show some actual sympathy for Lucas (who is not the devil, in case you didn't know; also, midichlorians (as stupid as they are) are not worse than Hitler). It's not because of Lucas's faults as a writer or director (his terrible dialogue and attempts at humor, not being an 'actor's director'); those didn't help, but hey, Episode 4 overcame them, right? And it's not because of the over-reliance on CGI landscapes and creatures; that didn't help either, but I'll be honest and admit I found Coruscant, Kamino and Mustafar more interesting than Tatooine and Hoth from the original trilogy. It's more what went into the CGI overload (cough, Jar-Jar, cough) than the overload itself.

People can and have pointed out all the problems with the Star Wars prequels; the missed opportunities, the bad decisions, the pandering to fans' love of the Original Trilogy (look, it's Chewbacca!), and the overall problem of George Lucas not being challenged by anyone during the entire production of these movies*. Hell, it's because of the Red Letter Media reviews (which I love and have watched more than I have most real films) that have kindled a recent resurgence of love for all things Star Wars for me. Which has included my re-reading of one person's dissertation-length defenses of Episodes I and II and which have made me reconsider where Lucas was coming from in making the prequels.

Now I'm not saying I suddenly feel I was wrong about the prequels. I just rewatched them all over the past weekend (with the Rifftrax commentary on, I'll admit), and the things I didn't like or were confused by during previous viewings are all still there. Jar-Jar, the dry political talk, the apparent lack of immediate significance of anything that happens on Naboo in Episode I, the missed opportunity of not showing Anakin's training and him and Obi-Wan becoming friends. Those are all major problems that hamper the prequels, and I'm not going to make excuses for them. I don't believe Lucas chose the wrong story to tell when he made the prequels, he just went about it poorly.

But the thing I realized recently, the problem that no one seems to have really considered in all their venom and dog-piling on the prequels, is that the story Lucas wanted to tell, or really just any story Lucas could have told in the prequels, would not have been Star Wars. It could not have been. Forget the fact that these movies are part of the Star Wars saga, forget the fact that we have characters from the Original Trilogy like Obi-Wan and Yoda playing significant roles. These movies are not the Original Trilogy, and they never could be. Not plot-wise, not tone-wise. That's the problem Lucas faced, and that's the problem no one considered before or after the movies were released.

The Original Trilogy and how it worked

What do I mean? Well, Episode IV was a self-contained adventure film borrowing heavily from the Flash Gordon-style serials that Lucas grew up on. At its heart it was light and pulpy. Big ideas like a planet-sized space station/weapon and an energy field uniting all living things gave the movie an epic feel, but the story was little more than Luke following Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey in a science-fiction setting influenced by samurai movies. It was entertainment, it was escapism, and it was completely unashamed in having the farm-boy protagonist defy an empire that spanned an entire galaxy by firing one precise shot (without the aid of a computer, even!). The heroes get into trouble and they get out unscathed and at the end the bad guys are defeated and everyone celebrates.

Then with Episodes V and VI the story expands a bit, the heroes suffer more, but at the end we still have a handful of adventurers delivering the blows that bring down the empire and restore peace and freedom to the galaxy (except not). The scope of the series has expanded to include new places like Hoth, Bespin City and the forest moon of Endor, but we're still focusing on just a farm-boy/Jedi-in-training, a princess/Rebel leader, and a smarmy, 'devil may care' rogue. And their droid and Wookie sidekicks**. The issues of how the Rebel Alliance is carrying on its actual rebellion is never discussed or shown, other than blowing up both Death Stars and cooling their heels on Hoth (pun intended). Who's the actual leader of the Rebellion? What's their strategy? Are they carrying out guerilla tactics on planets with a strong Imperial presence, or is it more about sabotaging the factories and construction sites of Imperial ships and weapons? How do they recruit people? Is the Alliance a singular entity or are there cells scattered across the galaxy?

We're not shown any of this, and it doesn't really matter because we're not concerned with the Empire vs. Alliance plot. It's just a background setting for the personal journeys of Luke, Han, and Leia. The Empire is just 'The Empire,' the basic idea of a tyrannical government imposing its will by force. Its military is made up stormtroopers who are merciless and efficient; they wear helmets to cover their face because its intimidating. And the officers are all British because the British are inherently terrifying. The Rebels are the good guys simply because they're opposing The Empire. We're never told what they're fighting for except maybe for vague notions like 'freedom' or 'peace.' All that matters is that one side is clearly evil and the other side, by virtue of being the other side, is good.

The actual details aren't given and they're really not important because, as I said, the movies aren't about the small Rebellion overthrowing the large Empire. The same story could have been told from the opposite perspective, with Luke fighting to protect the benevolent Kingdom from an upstart rebellion that wants to overthrow the king and set up a dictatorship. As long as there are bad guys for us, the audience, to hate we'll root for the people opposing them. It's a simple binary distinction that the overwhelming majority of man vs. man stories break down into. It's much rarer to see a story where either side could be considered good, and almost impossible to find one where both sides are evil, because then who would the audience relate to?

So the Original Trilogy was the story of our small group of adventurers cast against the backdrop of a galactic civil war, with the personal triumphs of Luke at the Battle of Yavin, Luke's redemption of his father and Han and Leia's assault on the shield generator on the forest moon of Endor acting as turning points in the war. These may not be the neatest examples of personal events affecting the larger story taking place, but they work in bridging the two plotlines. A huge scope with a fine attention to detail; it's what any epic should strive to be.

And to say the story worked is an understatement. What other movie or series of movies has had an impact on popular culture the way the Original Trilogy had? Luke and Han probably have a greater influence in pop culture today than classic myths like Hercules or King Arthur.

The key point here is that the story is ultimately simple, can appeal to a lot of people, and doesn't really demand too much of them as a viewer. All the political talk, so maligned in the prequels, isn't present. It's just blasters, lightsabers, and dog fights in space.

The prequels and what they aimed for

None of that was going to work with the story Lucas set out to tell in the prequels. It couldn't, and I'm going to try to show that is ultimately why the prequels disappointed people.

With the prequels there's two storylines we're following:

1) The rise and eventual fall of Anakin Skywalker, resulting in him turning to the Dark Side and becoming Darth Vader.

2) The rise of Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine and his eventual establishment of a Galactic Empire and destruction of the Jedi.

It's similar to the OT in that we have an individual's journey and a larger tale affecting the flow of history on a galactic scale. The difference here is that the second story, the fall of the Republic and Palpatine's rise to power, is just as important a story and it requires more attention and more time to unfold than the Rebels vs. Empire story ever needed in the OT. Depicting the fall of a republic that had been around for over a thousand generations and its being replaced by a tyrannical empire would involve more than showing something as singular yet vital as blowing up a Death Star or Vader throwing Palpatine down a shaft, killing him.

The place I want to start, then, is to repeat that the Rebel vs. Empire story in the OT allowed a tight focus. In The Empire Strikes Back it seems the entire rebellion is located on Hoth, and we're never shown thousands or even hundreds of troops at any point. This seems like a small, ragtag group. In Return of the Jedi we get to see the entire fleet before it heads for Death Star Mark II, and here we get a better idea of how big the Alliance is (still not so big that they're not challenged by the Imperial fleet at Endor).

With the prequels we're jumping back from a small rebellion against a large empire, and instead we're focusing on a unified (more or less) Republic spanning the entire galaxy. There's no small group of heroes for us to follow; it's a collection of planets and systems, and the legislative body they make up. The eventual fall of the Republic will happen because of the machinations of just one person, but it's a plan that spans a couple decades and involves the manufacture of political controversies and a civil war. A little more exposition is needed here than "There are bad guys. We need to shoot them."

Episode I is about Palpatine-as-Darth-Sidious leading the Trade Federation into blockading/invading a small planet on the rim of the galaxy, which the Senate on Coruscant will do nothing about because of corruption and bureaucratic redtape, allowing Palpatine-as-Palpatine, Senator from the victimized planet, to call for a vote of no confidence of the current Chancellor and have himself elected as the new Chancellor (possibly because he has his own lackeys in the Senate to nominate him and get him the necessary votes? I'm not sure if that was made clear). As plans go that's pretty good. It's effective (he does get voted Chancellor on a 'clean up ~~Washington~~ Coruscant' platform), and it shows he's a master at manipulating people and playing both sides against each other such that he wins either way.

The problem? It's not "Star Wars." It's not what the Original Trilogy was about, which was just laser guns and lightsabers. It's political dialogue and secrecy and people like the Jedi and the politicians discussing things they know all about but which we the audience aren't privy to. It's a bunch of stuff that Star Wars was never about, and attempts to retain what people expect and wanted of Star Wars turned out to be lightsaber fights that were too obviously choreographed, armies of CGI droids fighting armies of CGI frog-creatures, and the eventual hero of the Prequel Trilogy being introduced as a 9-year old who doesn't feel the call to adventure and instead just gets freed from slavery and brought to Coruscant because one of the Jedis is concerned about a prophecy (which we are never told). Anakin in this movie has virtually no agency as a character, which is the exact opposite of Luke in Episode IV wanting to get of Tatooine and wanting to train to become a Jedi as soon as the idea is presented to him***.

When the movie opens with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan coming to negotiate a trade dispute, it feels like we've come in in media res, and not in a way that makes it easy to catch up with, like Episode IV opening on the blockade runner trying to flee from the Star Destroyer. We're not drawn immediately into an action scene and we have no idea what the larger story is. This confusion continues through the rest of the film, even though we understand things like a droid army occupying a (curiously empty) city or a lightsaber fight between a couple Jedi and a Sith lord.

Part of it is what Lucas didn't include, like scenes of the Naboo people suffering under the droid occupation. But I'm not writing this to nitpick the prequels.

I think I understand what Lucas meant to do with Episode I: present the Republic and corrupt and crumbling from the inside. Portray the senators on Coruscant as beholden to special interests and uninterested in ensuring the safety or equal representation of everyone in the galaxy. It's not hard to present the idea of a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy of a government so that the audience understands it. Hell, make it a thinly veiled expy of American government and people will call you a genius satirist. But Lucas whiffed the major plot of Episode I and its role in the trilogy as a whole, focusing more on pod-racing and a four-way climax that was just noise and computer graphics and ultimately pointless.

Compare: Episode IV ends with Luke destroying the Death Star and the rebels celebrate this clear and obvious victory. Episode I ends with Padme leading a small group of her people to capture the Asian stereotype while the Gungans fight the droids and Anakin Gilligans his way into blowing up the droid control ship****. The victory on Naboo doesn't seem to change whatever has happened because either

a) You're enough of a Star Wars fan to know who Palpatine is (he was never named in the OT) and that his election as Chancellor is actually a bad thing

or

b) You're not a Star Wars fan and you just came to see blasters and lightsabers and you were bored by the political talk.

I'm sure there are people who fall somewhere between those two choices, but the big problem, as I said, is that the political talk is treated more as background noise or padding in-between the big action scenes (Chancellor Valorum, who's inefficiency/indecisiveness is key to Palpatine's plan, is never made into a real character or even a supporting character; people talk about him, but he never really seems to speak). Its hard to believe anyone watching Episode I when it first premiered was paying attention to such details because it's not what we expected of a Star Wars movie.

Which is my entire argument: People came into Episode I expecting it to be exactly like the OT in tone and how it focused on the characters and the small story. They weren't expecting political intrigue or discussion of senate procedures to be integral to the plot, and Lucas did nothing to prepare them for that.

And really, could he have? What would that ad campaign look like? "You loved the original Star Wars movies with all their action and special effects and big heroes and larger-than-life villains! Well shift your expectations to something else, because Episode I will only kind of, sort of be like that!"

Frankly, I'm not even sure Lucas knew that's what needed to be done, that people needed to be... warned, I guess I would say, that the prequels were doing something bigger and substantially different from the OT that people grew up with and loved. Maybe he had convinced himself that people would follow him willingly, that they would accept anything he called 'Episode I' just because it's Star Wars. Or maybe he just radically misjudged what people loved about the OT.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that the knew he had something different on his hands, I do have to feel some sympathy for his situation. He wasn't content in just retelling the OT with Anakin in the place of Luke. He wanted to explore the Republic and the Jedi Order before the dark times, before the Empire. There was no shortage of opportunity for big space battles or lightsaber duels (the prequels have plenty of them), but it meant that he couldn't have a farm-boy on some backwards planet get caught up in a civil war and almost single-handedly turn it around. The scope had to be widened for the prequels, and the problem was how to make sure people understood that going in?

Or could they understand it? I'm a sci-fi geek, Episodes IV and V were among my absolute favorite movies growing up and when I was a teenager I read a handful of the Expanded Universe books. I went into Episode I knowing far more than the average moviegoer who, I'll be blunt and insulting here, probably just wanted to be distracted for a couple hours while they shoveled popcorn into their face. That's all most people seem to care about, big shiny crap to keep them occupied for a while.

I think Lucas misjudged his audience. It's pretty obvious the man has a mind for commercialism and maximizing profit, but here he made a serious misstep in assuming people would be onboard for political discussion and anything more convoluted than 'good guys shoot at bad guys.' It wasn't too much of a misstep financially, but it did get the ball rolling on the 'George Lucas raped my childhood' dog-piling that will probably continue until he dies and is sanctified.

I'm not sure what else to say. Lucas apparently wanted to expand his universe and tell a much more epic story than the OT was, thinking that people would follow because they loved the setting rather than the adventure or the characters. And that was the biggest problem. It's not just the CGI or Jar-Jar or how poorly written the romance was or anything else I could nitpick. It's that Lucas wanted to write a story deeper and more involved than what audiences expect. Big blockbusters weren't the best format for this story because the audience wasn't there. Maybe if he had written a trilogy of books or written this story for a comic book series, something that only hardcore Star Wars fans would seek out, reaction would have been different.

So I sympathize with the problems Lucas was facing when he decided to return to the franchise that made him so wealthy, even if I'm not entirely sorry for him. He deserves the blame for the poor decisions he made, but I don't think the complaint that the prequels "don't feel like Star Wars" is entirely valid. They weren't supposed to, even if we didn't realize that.

*I'm not in a position to claim that Lucas runs his business like a tyrant and has eliminated anyone that questions him, nor can I say that the people who do work for him are afraid of him, but that's the impression that comes forth when you see clips of the production. Lucas is in a powerful position, and the people under him may either be drinking the Kool-Aid or are more concerned with keeping their jobs than with confronting him over the presence of Jar-Jar Binks or lines like "I wish I could just wish away my feelings." But the end result, the undeniable product, is that the Prequel Trilogy was run by Lucas himself and as a whole it's weaker than the Original Trilogy.

I think an unavoidable problem of the prequels is that Lucas wasn't challenged and/or didn't have people from the outside working with him on the plot and direction themselves. I like Quentin Tarantino as a writer and director, but when the man is allowed to run free he can be self-indulgent to the extreme. A good producer or editor to rein him in a bit can help him create something that's great and doesn't go over-the-top. I think Lucas is in the same position: lots of energy and ideas and he's eager to do everything all at once, but he needs someone more mellow or level-headed to help keep him on a proper path.

**I think keeping the focus on just Luke, Han, Leia and the rest is an overlooked reason why Return of the Jedi is weaker than the other films. It feels too unbelievable, outside the realm of a suspension of disbelief, that this group of adventurers would be leading the pivotal assault on the shield generator (with a handful of rebel troops, too, I guess). For frig's sake, Han was just released from carbonite freezing, like, a day or two before they leave for Endor.

"Hey Han, you were frozen for quite a while. You maybe want to take some leave to make sure you're fully recovered and that there's no long-term effects?"
"Nah, I'm good. Come on, Chewie, I got my eyesight back. Let's mount a two-guy attack on an Imperial base."

Hell, Han's not even a military leader (and I don't care if he was given honorary rank at Yavin; there's a big difference between a battlefield promotion and proving you're a capable leader over the long haul). Are we supposed to believe he went from the Chaotic Good rogue/smuggler he was in the first two movies (on Hoth he was only concerned with getting back to Tatooine and paying off Jabba; the attack on the base meant next to nothing to him) to a military leader that can inspire the rebel grunts to follow him into battle? Did the carbonite change his personality? (Well, that would explain his whiny petulance during the faux love triangle part of the movie.) And aren't there any Rebel officers annoyed that this smuggler just waltzes in and gets promoted so easily?

What they should have done instead was come up with another mission on Endor, something that requires only a couple people, and then have Han and Chewie volunteer for that because it's dangerous and exciting and right up their alley.

***I just realized: is it ever explained in Episode IV that Luke is Force-sensitive and thus is capable of becoming a Jedi, or does Obi-Wan just offer to train him, as if anyone could become a Jedi if they trained at it? I guess it's just implied to be a hereditary thing, and since Luke's father was a Jedi, he could become one.

****Hey, Naboo is saved! Oh wait, Palpatine is chancellor now. Ignoring the larger ramifications of this (stage one of the bad guy's plan just got checked off the list), this means that the whole "daring raid on the palace" was kind of pointless, because if Padme and the Jedi had just waited a while, then now-Chancellor Palpatine would have arranged for the Republic to throw its weight behind helping Naboo. The Trade Federation may have buckled under little more than the threat of a hundred Jedi coming in to smash up all their droids, and the occupation would have ended before any fighting even began.

In other words, the 'victory' of liberating Naboo would have happened anyway if the heroes had done nothing.

NaNoWriMo in July Day 25 Report

2011-07-28T10:00:00.001-05:00

Words needed: 40,322
Words written at end of day: 40,693

Shit, I was supposed to write this on Monday, or at least Tuesday, wasn't I? Oops.

I've had a couple more 'off' days since I last updated, not days where I didn't write anything at all but days where I didn't keep up with the par. A recurring problem has been conversations not going anywhere or I get bogged down in characters thinking too much about what has happened and what it implies rather than going out and doing anything. The same problem I've mentioned before every other time I've done a NaNoWriMo.

The past couple days I've been better at having stuff happen and making sure the storyline is moving forward, though the imminent problem of running out of notes made before I started writing has come to pass, and now I'm just making it up as I go along. I've come up with the outline of a story, or least of a situation that causes everything that happen. At some point over the past couple weeks I've abandoned the idea for the big threat that I had in mind and I've come up with something a bit more complex, which means I'll be writing a lot more before I can conclude the story (I'm still at the point where the characters are learning about what's happening) and I'll have to go back and do a lot of revisions to make sure everything makes sense.

For instance, last time I talked about how the entire introduction and how the two characters met and got started on their quest did not work for me at all. I had more or less rushed to get the characters on the trail, but I hadn't come up with a solid reason why they would be on it in the first place. I now have some ideas on how to redo the opening scene and how to set the plot in motion, though I still need to work on getting the characters fleshed out. But there will be time for that later.

Also, I've now reached a point where I've separated the two heroines, and each is being told part of the story so far (each from a different perspective). I need to figure out how to get them back together, which I don't want to leave until Act III when everything comes to a head and gets resolved. One of the plot threads I consider vital to the story is the growing relationship between the two, and it can't build when they're in two different universes.

Also, while one of the character's actions since the separation makes sense enough (Katrina, stuck in a world populated by Reptoids, has bluffed that she's an ambassador sent to negotiate an accord to prevent the all-out war the heroines think is brewing), the other, Val, has been moved into a partnership with a special Army taskforce, but I've been struggling to make their partnership logical from both her and their perspective. What I have so far is a sort of cheat, having the officer in charge of the taskforce show that he is familiar with Val's past, or some part of it, and has reason to believe she'll be of some help. Part of this is a sort of sequel hook; I don't explain fully why he trusts her, just that he has a file on her. If I get a chance to write a future story with these characters the file and its contents would be explained then (I already know what's in it).

But I feel like I'm handwaving why a military taskforce would bring in a civilian (who, I've already established, they know is not even an American citizen) to help with an operation involving the apparently imminent invasion of other-dimensional lizard people. I mentioned last time that the entire story is heavily influenced by (ie. I'm outright stealing from) Doctor Who, particularly the Third Doctor's time exiled on Earth and working as a 'science advisor' to UNIT. I haven't seen the first appearances of UNIT from the Second Doctor's era, which would explain why the Brigadier et al would trust the Doctor during dangerous situations, so I've had to come up with my own reasons. But I'm not entirely happy with them.

Part of it is that I wrote the first scene when Val meets the taskforce as if they had no idea who she was, and now I'm going to have to go back and change that to reflect what I just wrote last night, when the leader of the taskforce shows Val the file on her. Do I just have the leader imply/outright state that he knows who Val is in that earlier scene?

This isn't a major problem, fixing it may well just require changing that earlier scene and nothing else, but right now it's a loose wire that I can't repair yet, so it bothers me.

Anyway, I'm on track to hit 50,000 words by the end of Sunday, or possibly on Saturday (yesterday I got into a good area and almost hit 3,000 words). I'm nowhere near the end of the story itself, of course, so I'll have to keep writing into August and perhaps beyond. That's when the real test comes, keeping to this schedule.

The Year in Crazy Part 81

2011-07-28T08:33:00.001-05:00

For the past few weeks the only real story in politics has been the debt ceiling and the deficit and other economic stuff that makes my eyes glaze over. I haven't been paying attention to the actual numbers and such, but I have been watching the developing story of how the Tea Party is forcing the Republicans to shoot down every proposal President Obama and the Democrats put forth, even ones that have more drastic cuts than the Republican plans. Wag the dog indeed. Nothing there has really jumped out at me as "Completely crazy," so I haven't updated this list in a while.

But then yesterday I saw this story about conservatives trying to make hay out of McDonald's making their Happy Meals healthier (by their logic this is not the result of McDonald's trying to clean its image and providing the growing health-conscious population a better offering, but is solely the result of Michele Obama forcing private businesses to do things her way), which reminded me of the earlier story about conservatives getting up in arms over lightbulbs.

No really, lightbulbs. They tried to turn energy efficient lightbulbs into a rallying cry "for freedom!" They even had the Statue of Liberty crying over it.

Of course, nobody really cared in the end, just as they didn't care earlier this year when Sarah Palin tried to make a big ado about a school supposedly banning sugar or when Michelle Bachmann et al spoke out against the First Lady advocating breastfeeding.

There is no logic to any of this, even though they try to say it's about "freedom of choice" (and since when were conservatives pro-choice?). It's about nothing more than opposing the Obamas on any and everything and making even something like child obesity a divisive, political argument. Even the traditional idea of a First Lady having a pet cause has become a lightning rod that conservatives have to strike at (sorry for the quality on that vid).

Which is stupid to the extreme, if not completely crazy. But what is crazy is that people taking Palin and Bachmann seriously, and they want one or both of them to run for President. And those batshit wingnuts who think either of them are qualified for the Presidency? They're the ones calling the shots during this debt ceiling/deficit crisis. And THAT is crazy.

Captain America: Fuck Yeah!

2011-07-27T16:38:00.004-05:00

(Couldn't resist that title)

My finances have taken a hit the past couple months due a combination of less hours at work and something being off-kilter with my blood, so that I haven't been able to donate plasma. This has meant the releases of Cars 2, Super 8, Green Lantern, and Harry Potter have all come and I haven't been to the theater. But Captain America opened last Friday and I learned that the director of it was the director of The Rocketeer, the very same movie I've been saying should have provided the template for a Captain America movie.

From my post about Thor and X-Men: First Class:

Do I really need to explain my fears about Hollywood turning Captain America, a figure from several decades ago (in a movie set back then), into just another modern action character? Do I need to explain my fears about this movie being another "too smart, too cool for it's own good" orgy of excesses?

In my mind, the perfect Captain America movie would be like The Rocketeer: completely unashamed to mimic the old school style of Hollywood spectacle. Tongue-in-cheek, but never belaboring the fact that it's in on the joke. Lots of action, but no gratuitous violence or too-ridiculous set-pieces (people falling countless stories and walking away unscathed, huge explosions for no reason). And above all a sense of clear-eyed optimism and moral code with a story that's willing to accommodate such an anachronistic philosophy.

I go to movies like this for the spectacle and the fun and carefree "heroes will always win" whizbanggery. I want to get lost in these movies and just enjoy myself, not see some dour, serious Hero With a Troubled Past, or worse, a dour, serious movie that can't just let go and enjoy itself. I don't want to see Captain America liberating a concentration camp or any lingering shots of a corpse-riddled battlefield (and I may sound horrible for saying that, but reread what I just said about going to movies for the spectacle).

And it'd be nice if the movie avoids the other typical cliches, like the hero hanging from a ledge during the climax, or The Girl getting one scene to show she's tough and then being relegated to fawning kidnap-bait the rest of the film. Is that too much to ask?

And it hit all the right beats. It's fun. It gets weighty, but never dour. The action is never confusing or over-the-top (no falling several stories and getting up and walking away), but it's never really impressive either. The love interest proves she's tough and capable both in the first act (as is expected) and during the final battle scene. She's never the weak damsel-in-distress.

It gets everything right that I was hoping it would get right, though there are some flaws.

I love that Steve Rogers doesn't just go from the first and only Super Soldier to being a one-man army on the frontlines. The USO scenes are hilarious and his first, improvised mission in the war zone plays out great. The transition works, but then suddenly it's a montage of Captain America and the Howling Commandos attacking all these bases in Europe, like they had filmed a bunch of action scenes and then they decided to cut out the beginning and ending of them and they just wanted to show all the punches and explosions. We're left to accept that they're taking out the Red Skeleton's Hydra bases, but the movie doesn't seem interested in making this suspenseful or worth focusing on. I liked the climax well enough, so I don't mind terribly that the movie wanted to get there faster.

The other "takes me out of the film" problem is something I knew about going in, because the guys at Half in the Bag talked about it at length in their review: that Captain America had a politically correct, multiethnic squadron. They have a black guy, a French guy, a British guy, and an Asian guy with an emo haircut.

I really don't give a flying crap about foreign markets or about forcing diversity into every cast, but it never really bothers me. Usually I ignore how EVERY DAMN GROUP OF FRIENDS in TV and movies has to have one black guy and one Asian or Hispanic guy, but this time, no. It's World War II. America had a segregated military. It was what it was, as stupid and racist as it was.

Plus the Howling Commandos barely get any screentime outside of their introductory scene and the one at the bar when Captain America asks them to be on his special team, so why bother? Why shoehorn in an Asian guy and take a few seconds to have him say 'I'm from Fresno' when he's not even given a name or does anything later? I mean, I expect that when this movie is brought to the Asian markets that guy will get prominent placement in the posters and commercials, but it's really just a fake-out.

But other than those two things, I really enjoyed Captain America. Like I said, it's fun, it doesn't get dour or over-the-top, and I liked how Red Skull's plan involving the Cosmic Cube and direct references to Norse mythology help set up the Avengers movie.

***

Two afterthoughts:

1) I noticed that Nick Fury has three scars coming from under his eyepatch. Setting up an Avengers/X-Men crossover movie?

2) In the Half in the Bag review they talk about the lack of swastikas and how Red Skull leading Hydra somehow made the movie PC, as if you can't even villify the Nazis or present real-world powers as villains. On the other hand, some people have already leapt to the conclusion that the movie is pro-war propaganda. They're both wrong: Red Skull and Hydra are from the Marvel universe, and Red Skull being a sort of deserter with his own plans works for the movie. And as for propaganda, I don't think see it. World War II was a just war, I think most anyone can agree with that, but there's nothing in the movie to imply this is supposed to be a stand-in for either of our current wars (Steve Rogers even says he doesn't want to kill people, but he doesn't like bullies and he can't stand by why others are laying down their lives). You can't propagandize a war that's over, can you?

Books 24-26: Magic or Madness

2011-07-27T16:22:00.001-05:00

Magic or Madness
Magic Lessons
Magic's Child by Justine Larbeleister (C+)

I feel like I need to be revising my grading system. It's easy enough when something just floors me and I can give it an 'A,' or if there's one minor flaw or something missing an 'A-.' Then the 'B-, B, and B+' range is kind of tricky, particularly when I'm being generous with something. I just can't seem to give a book that's merely OK a 'C' or something in that range, even though 'C' is supposed to mean 'average' or 'satisfactory.'

So stacked against my other reviews a C+ for the Magic or Madness trilogy (and I am reviewing it as a trilogy, for reasons I'll get to in a moment) may seem like an insult, but it's really just a matter of me not being either over- or underwhelmed by these books. They're serviceable, but lacking any real 'oomph' until the climax of the third book.

Back when I talked about James Patterson I mentioned that every Monday night I pull lots of books, usually massmarket hardcovers and paperbacks. One thing I've noticed is that an overwhelming majority of Young Adult books belong to series or franchises. It's not just the Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Paranormal Romance ones either; there are franchises about regular high school girls dealing with uppy cliques or whatever. After reading the Magic or Madness trilogy (which, according to an afterword in the third book, was bought by the publisher as a planned trilogy) I am now wondering if this is the standard operating procedure of the publishing industry. Do they intentionally seek out story ideas that lend themselves to trilogies or ongoing series the way Hollywood would rather invest in a pre-existing property like a comic book series, which then lends itself to sequels?

Being a lifelong fan of comic books, I'm not against the idea of open-ended sagas or of characters who bounce from one adventure to another. But just as James Patterson's forays into Young Adult fantasy or manga smack of commercialism, so too does this. It can work if done properly, but it takes a lot to justify telling a story over the course of three books when you could have written just one long book instead.

And the thing with Magic or Madness is that it doesn't work. I don't see any vital reason this had to be a trilogy, not the story Larbeleister told. Yes, I can understand how the overall story is broken into three parts and there are neat enough endings to the first two books, but neither have the sense of a conclusion or that everything has been wrapped up. The second book is worse than the first in this regard, but they both end with the feeling that nothing has been resolved and the series is practically begging us to stick around for a finale.

Compare this to Midnighters, which is much more episodic; you can stop reading after the first or second book and while you would miss out on the ultimate conclusion the third one provides, you still have some resolution.

In fact, let me try to sum up what happens in each book of MoM, just to illustrate what I mean by this:

Book 1: We're introduced to Reason, a 15-year old girl who has lived her life traveling around Australia with her mother, who warned her that her grandmother is a witch (or pretends to be, since Reason's mother denies that magic exists) who will do terrible things to her if she catches them. The story opens with Reason's mother having gone insane and being committed, and her grandmother being given guardianship. Right from the start Reason plans on escaping from her grandmother, but before she gets a chance she meets a boy her age (Tom) whose family Reason's grandmother helps financially, and then Reason goes through a magic door in her grandmother's house to New York City where she meets a girl her age (Jay-Tee) who takes her to a man later revealed to be Reason's grandfather who feeds off the magic of Jay-Tee (and at one point Reason) BECAUSE we learn that people with magic either go insane for not using it or eat up their life by using it. So either you can use magic and die young or not use it and go insane. Meanwhile Tom and Reason's grandmother have followed her to NYC to find her and there's a climax between Reason's grandparents before they all (minus the grandfather) go back to Australia.

Whew.

OK, so that seems like a lot, but keep in mind most of that establishing the world and its rules. The book itself is a lot of padding, like Jay-Tee showing the backwoods Reason around NYC or Tom meeting with his sister while in America. They don't advance the plot or reveal much about the characters.

Book 2: Reason's grandmother starts to teach the three teens how to use magic (well, she's already been teaching Tom when the series starts). Something on the other side of the Sydney-NYC door comes through and attacks the teens, focusing on Reason. Reason is pulled through the door to NYC by a mysterious hobo who overpowers her when she tries to fight him. Unable to get back to Sydney she gets in touch with Jay-Tee's brother, who buys her clothes, takes her to dinner, helps her follow the hobo's magic trail to a cemetery, then later that night sleeps with her. Reason's grandfather tries to attack her, but she and Jay-Tee's brother run, the hobo takes Reason through the door to Sydney and then to a cemetery plot of Reason's ancestors. Hobo turns out to be an ancient ancestor who was incredibly powerful with magic, which he gives to Reason and then dies. Reason is revealed to be pregnant.

Meanwhile, Jay-Tee almost dies from using up her magic, Tom gives her some, then confronts Reason's grandmother about stealing his magic before without him knowing that's what she was doing.

Again, lots of wheel-spinning, especially since the other characters are stuck in Sydney and unable to do anything for much of the book.

Third book: Reason is incredibly powerful now, so powerful she's able to turn off Jay-Tee's magic and prevent her from dying. She seems to be 'evolving' and ascending to a plane of pure magic. Her mother gets kidnapped from the sanitarium by her grandfather, so Reason and her grandmother go looking for them while Jay-Tee and Tom, staying in Sydney, hook up. Reason jumps around to a couple places then finds her mother, who has been made sane but uses up the rest of her magic and starts dying. Reason saves her mother by giving her some magic, but then her grandfather uses her mother to steal all of her magic. Reason, with help from her grandmother, fights back and transports all of them back to Sydney. She saves Tom's mother (who, like her own, had been insane), then turns off her own magic, which ends up turning off the magic of all her relatives as well. She and her mother begin living with her grandmother, she gives birth nine months later, end series.

All that, all three books? Over 800 pages, but there's so much that feels like padding to draw out the series as a whole so it can take up three books. The truly frustrating thing about this is that Larbeleister has come up with an interesting take on magic, with rules and limitations and consequences, but the entire series takes place over about two weeks. Everything I described up above takes place during one fortnight. No time for Reason to learn much about how to use her magic, no examination of how magic has impacted other people except for how it's affected Reason's and Tom's and Jay-Tee's parents and/or grandparents, and arguably worst of all, no chance for Reason to really get to know her grandmother or the other people her own age. Even into the third book we're reading about how Reason doesn't fully trust her grandmother, whereas in a series that had progressed a bit slower would have already moved past that. The relationships between the characters would have grown and changed and would feel more natural.

There's also the problem that, similar to Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy, the main character doesn't feel as in control of her own destiny. It makes a bit more sense here because Reason has no proper schooling, no experience with city life, and has had an abnormal upbringing, but both her and Tally Youngblood are manipulated by people around them or tossed around by circumstances beyond their control. It's disconcerting, in a way, to have a protagonist who isn't triumphing because of their own struggles and growth, but rather just happens to be in the right place when the right circumstances line up.

It's a bit worse in MoM, though, because the ultimate climax of the series is Reason making the decision to give up her magic, rather than become something more-than human. It's a choice between exploring some beautiful new world for centuries and enjoying immense power, or staying with her friends and family.

But why does the decision have to be made? Because it fell into her lap. She didn't seek out power or knowledge or some artifact like the Holy Grail, and then realize she needed to make a choice about what really matters. She was just thrust into it. The scene loses its impact when you consider that.

Now I don't want to just nitpick every thing that bothered me. The series was enjoyable enough while I was reading it, but it left me with the feeling of not being satisfied. It could have been more than it is, and it's especially disappointing when I think about the 'forced into a series' feel of it. One longer book could have covered the same ground as the entire trilogy, and most likely better.

Part Last: There is no 'try' (but there should have been)

2011-07-25T14:17:00.000-05:00

I originally wanted to write this back when I read Kingdom Come and came up with my (still on hold) webcomic idea, but I just couldn't articulate what I wanted to say. So I let this post sit unfinished, my mind moved onto other things, and I kind of forgot about it. But a similar fount of endless frustration, which I will blog about after this, has led to me deciding it was time to do something with this post, even if it is rambling and pointless.

Onto the post, which I started back in April.

***

Forgive me for not letting the subject of Left Behind just die, but there's so much wrong with it that I want to get off my mind. A friend of mine suggested someone should give this series the Rifftrax or Red Letter Media treatment, and if I knew how to make videos like RLM does I'd definitely consider taking it up. Or if I could find an online manuscript of the books that I could copy and paste (instead of trying to type up every single book; just typing up the quoted bits in my liveblog of Kingdom Come took a ridiculous amount of time) I'd try to riff on it.

Instead I just have a blog, and while I can't make a darkly humorous critique of the series or poke fun at it's many maaaaaaaaaaaaany flaws, I can talk about the big things that bother me.

And the biggest of them all, the foundation upon which all the other problems are built, is so fundamental you really have to stop and think about it if you hope to understand everything else in the series. It's this: through their writing, L/J don't give the impression that they were interested in telling a good story with these books. They're certainly don't give the impression that they tried to tell the best story they could, but I question if they even tried to tell a proper story period.

What I see in these books is that Tim LaHaye had an idea for a story based on a literal interpretation of the book of Revelation, and since he has no experience writing fiction or was too busy to do it himself, he hired Jerry Jenkins to do it. Jenkins has a work ethic of 'get it done fast and move on,' and he was able to release 16 books over the space of about 12 years because he doesn't take the time to go back over what he's written. It really is just a matter of quantity over quality for him. He probably just entered the partnership with LaHaye for the paycheck, which means only one of the two even cared about what story was being told (and he wasn't the one writing it).

But to give LaHaye that benefit of the doubt is exceedingly charitable itself, because it seems he did little in the writing of the series beyond come up with notes about what events were supposed to take place (as in, the big Acts of God events like the Rapture and the rise of the Antichrist) and then handed it to Jenkins to write a sequence of events that included these large-scale events while waiting for the checks to start rolling in.

That has to be the case, right? LaHaye wasn't involved in the actual writing or took it upon himself to look over the manuscripts, because that would mean that not one but two people - presumably human beings who have some experience interacting with other human beings and understand how people behave - churned out this crap and thought it was acceptable as literature. At least if LaHaye was just the initial idea man there's the explanation that Jenkins rushed through the series, submitted only first-drafts, and was concerned only with jumping between one large event to the next.

That's the only explanation I see as plausible: a lack of care, of real interest, from either of the two people who have their name on the covers of these books. But then why were these books written?

Money is the obvious answer. Hal Lindsay's The Late, Great Planet Earth was a huge bestseller (I may be wrong, but I recall hearing that it was the best-selling book of the entire 1970s), but by the publication of the first book in the LB series it was a couple decades old. With the 20th century coming to a close End Times stories were poised to become more relevant to the zeitgeist, which would of course translate to big gobs of money to be made. Maybe I'm reading a little more into this than there is, but like I said with James Patterson, a shameless attempt to cash in on a popular genre seems the most probable explanation.

But the problem with the Left Behind series, the foundation of all the minutia crap others have spent years detailing and examining, is that Jenkins couldn't seem to be bothered to even aim for semi-competent hackdom. He didn't try to create relatable characters with flaws and realistic personalities, he just had roles to fill (the preacher, the techie, the military guy) and when a character had been around long enough he killed them off and replaced them with someone else to serve the same role. And he didn't try to write a story with an arc, a beginning, a rise to the climax, and a resolution; he just had his timeline of prophesied events he treated as a wordy 'connect-the-dots.'

He just didn't try. He didn't try to have a coherent plot or compelling characters. Succeeding at one or the other would make the books at least somewhat bearable, and just attempting to do so would earn some credit for them. Writing's not the easiest thing, I say this from personal experience, and making the effort warrants some respect, even if all you're trying to do is create some popcorn fare to keep people distracted for a while. It doesn't have to be Shakespeare; fuck, even Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. The Bard himself was just in it for the money. There's no crime there. I don't blame Jenkins for wanting money.

But does he have no work ethic? Is he so lazy that he can't think of anything more compelling than scene after scene of travel logistics, that he can't spend just five frigging minutes contemplating the effects, short and long-term, of something like the disappearance of all the children on Earth?

And you want to know what makes this really pathetic? What makes it actually surprising that LaHaye and Jenkins would churn out something so obviously rushed and not thought out? It's stuff like this:

Ecclesiastes 9:10
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

Colossians 3:23
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.

And from their own freaking books:

Kingdom Come, Pg. 266: I learned to play the harp and always played my best to honor my God.

These books are (supposedly) meant to warn people about what will happen any day now! The Rapture could happen before I finish writing this post! If you're not saved your life is in imminent danger! Beware! Bewaaaaaaaaaaaaaaare!

This series is supposed to be evangelism, and this is how they go about it? By crapping a collection of phone calls and scenes where a douchebag berates a woman he strung along in an emotional affair before getting bored with her? Is this what L/J think will get people to accept Jesus? Is this how they thought they could best honor God?

It can't be. It... it just can't be. They can't really be this incompetent. And yet...

NaNoWriMo in July Day 17 Report

2011-07-18T09:43:00.002-05:00

Words needed: 27,419
Words written at end of day: 27,557

Sometime over the past couple weeks I fell into tracking my progress against the daily par count the Camp NaNoWriMo site provides instead of going off my usual count of 1,667 words per day. So right now I'm a little under 800 words behind where my NaNoWriMo poster says I should be, but that's designed for a 30-day month and the Camp NaNoWriMo site is going off a 31-day month. So I'm keeping ahead of where I need to be in terms of word count, but not well ahead. My day 4 report had me almost 2,000 words ahead of schedule, but one bad day since then (bad in that I failed to keep on top of writing; I was called into work a full 8-hour shift that day, and then when I got home I spent the evening watching the Rifftrax of Indiana Jones 4. By the time I was done with that I was too tired to do any writing) has brought me alongside the regular word count. No buffer zone for me now.

Although I have the next two days off and with a heat wave apparently moving in I won't be leaving the house unless an emergency forces me to. I'm trying to get a regular daily... well, it's not a schedule since my ever-changing work hours don't allow for something so consistent, but I'm trying to get in the habit of devoting one hour a day to reading and one hour to studying Japanese. I've got my textbooks from when I studied it in Seattle (and absolutely bombed, my work ethic back then virtually non-existent) and I've been meaning to go back and make a serious attempt for years now.

Also, I've just changed my Netflix account to streaming only, so no more getting DVDs that I feel compelled to watch and send back as soon as possible. One less distraction there.

Anyway, the writing. I haven't made anything resembling an outline of the plot so I can't say if I'm still in Act 1 or in the middle of Act 2. I have no idea how much longer the plot is going to go (as I said in my day 4 report, I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll run out of notes, but the story will still have to continue to a natural (enough) climax and conclusion), but I can definitely say I'm nowhere near Act 3 yet.

I'm continuing to move through the plot at a good pace, very little downtime where the characters are just talking about what has happened and postulating on what may happen next (the major problem I encountered last November). Things are happening, or at least the two heroines are discovering things and getting an idea of what's going on. This isn't really an action story where the plot moves from one fight scene or chase to another one. Actually, other than one attempted shooting there hasn't been any real action that has directly involved the main characters. It's been them trying to uncover facts and learning about what's been happening "offscreen," which I hope is still proactive enough.

I think I need to explain the story a bit to make clear what problems I'm having, so here's what's happened so far: the story takes place in a vacation resort town in Florida, away from any big cities and more or less undiscovered by tourists. For all intents and purposes is the boondocks, out in the middle of nowhere. The first character, Katrina, is a local inbetween her junior and senior years of high school. One day a young woman in what seems to be a flight suit washes up on the beach, a storm out at sea supporting her story that she had been flying, caught in the storm, and her plane went down.

As I've written the opening now Katrina tries to help the woman, Val, who refuses to go to a hospital or contact any authority figures such as the police or coast guard. Val finds a place to spend the night, says goodbye to Katrina, and then leaves Sea Haven the next day. Katrina a) doesn't believe Val's story about being caught in the storm, b) doesn't have the chance to butt into Val's personal business too much, but c) becomes interested in Val during their brief encounter. But when Val abruptly leaves Katrina just moves on with her life, not getting too worked up over a mysterious woman that comes into her life and leaves almost immediately.

Cut to a couple months later and Katrina spots Val back in town. Curious again, she confronts Val about the bullshit 'plane crash' story and asks her who she really is (Katrina's best theory is that she's a criminal of some kind, on the run from either the police and/or accomplices she double-crossed, though she is aware that's a bit fanciful an explanation). Val deflects her questions and instead ropes Katrina into taking her to one of the town's tourist attractions, a Spanish fort built by conquistadors.

At the fort somebody tries to shoot Val, and from here the women uncover a group of lizard people posing as humans gathering intelligence on the surface world before (in all likelihood) an invasion is mounted. They further learn that one of the lizard-man spies had been arrested at a nearby Army base (and subsequently escaped), the official story being that he had tried to enter with a fake ID and his car was full of surveillance equipment; though this doesn't hold up to a discovery Val soon makes that the lizard-man had been working on post for several months before this. The question of why a fake story was given to the media and what the lizard-man was doing at the base is raised.

I've now reached the point in the story where Val and Katrina have tracked the lizard-men to what they expected was their underground home, but which is actually a device for interdimensional travel. Katrina has been sent to the other universe and Val has been prevented from following her as the military has shown up. And that's where things lie now.

The story has been very heavily influenced by Doctor Who, and I've included several overt references to it (including a couple floating the idea that Val is actually the Doctor in a future regeneration; she's not, of course, but I just liked slipping the idea in for my own amusement), specifically the classic series story The Silurians and the modern 'revamping' of it The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood. In a general sense I'm following the idea of "The Doctor uncovers an imminent invasion/threat in a small town out in the middle of nowhere and tries to prevent catastrophe through the use of science and diplomacy rather than violence and force." I don't have a conclusion of the story in mind, but I'm trying to aim for a third option between what happened in The Silurians and at the end of Cold Blood.

I'm also trying to establish a Doctor/Companion type relationship between Val and Katrina, with the latter trying to keep up while the former knows far more about what's going on, how it's happening, and what needs to be done. Val's not supposed to be infallible, but I've had her mention that she often falls into these kinds of situations and is more or less at home in danger and intrigue.

With the storyline itself I'm pretty content with how it's progressing. I've had a little too much 'let's talk about what's going on and what might happen next' for my taste, and I'll have to be vicious when it comes time to edit and pare this down. I'm not as happy right now with Val and Katrina and how fleshed out their characters have been. The cost of having them move from plot point A to plot point B rapidly is that there isn't as much downtime or chances for them to get to know each other well (and through that let the audience get to know them; I know I can include paragraph upon paragraph of their past and their character and what they're thinking, but, you know, show don't tell).

But the problem I'm really struggling with, getting back to what I said way up above, is the opening part. Arranging for Katrina to meet Val and get caught up in the hunt for the lizard people and the mystery of what the Army is hiding. From the attempted murder at the fort on, the plot is flowing logically enough, but it's getting Val and Katrina to the fort that's bothering me. I haven't established why Val wanted to go there in the first place, and nothing involving the lizard-men or what the Army may be hiding has touched upon that either; it's as if Val was following her own objective and the attempted murder dragged her into a different story. And I'm not happy with the entire scene of Val appearing and then leaving the town right away. I'm going to rewrite the opening from scratch, but since I don't have a solid idea yet what I'll do it's always in the back of my mind, distracting me. I'm thinking I should try to mimic the beginning of The Eleventh Hour, with Val turning up in town by accident and getting drawn into the mystery because maybe Katrina already knew something strange was going on. Maybe on one of my days off I'll have to do my writing for that day, and then try to rewrite the opening with the free time I have left.

The problem with that is my writing habits the past couple weeks have fallen into "Spend all day doing Internet stuff and keeping up with Tweetdeck and whatnot, and then in the evening sit down to actually write." I haven't had to deal with any writer's block yet, which is good, but I'm usually not getting into the writing mentality until 8 or 9 at night or even later. It makes it feel like I'm forcing myself just to meet the minimum word count for the day, rather than working to get the story told. Does that make sense? I'm not saying I could somehow spend an entire day writing and get 10,000 words out if I wrote from 9 AM to midnight. But I think I can be doing more than I am, if I could just make writing a priority.

So that's where things stand now: I'm moving forward but I'm plagued by major problems I have to fix.

Books 18-23: Maria Holic

2011-07-13T16:30:00.001-05:00

Maria Holic vol. 1-6 by Minari Endou (B+)

LESBIANS!

Now that I have your attention, let's talk about lesbians.

More manga to 'artificially' inflate my book count for the year, and this time I waited until I got through the six volumes that are currently out, rather than read them one or two at a time like I've been doing with Bleach.

The series is presumably a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the yuri (girls' love) genre, but there's no real romance to the story. The only yuri element is that Kanako, the main character, is a lesbian (who has just transfered to an all girls school for the explicit purpose of finding her soulmate), but this being a comedy her attraction is cranked up to ridiculous levels of constant arousal (represented by the good old Japanese stand-by: nosebleeds).

And then there's the other set-up of the plot: the titular Mariya, the first person Kanako meets and falls for upon arriving at the school, is actually a jerkass male posing as a female student (the explanation, given in volume 2 rather than being dragged out for any kind of mystery or suspense purposes, is that 'she' and 'her' twin sister have to switch identities in high school in order to win a bet and inherit the chair...personship of both the school and its all-boys counterpart).

Either of these elements (cross-dressing, near-constant arousal) could make for an interesting comedy, but the surprising thing is that the series more or less ignores them while carrying on like a regular high school drama (an often surrealist high school drama, that is). Looking back, most of the storylines seem to center on Kanako's poor study habits and grades, her dealing with her classmates (in never-romantic interactions), and occasional reminders of Mariya and their sister's wager, although nothing yet has come from the last one.

In fact, there would probably be little retooling needed to change Mariya from a cross-dresser to an actual woman. 'She' could still be merciless to Kanako, still be wealthy and always followed by her dutiful (but barely-loyal) maid, and the story so far wouldn't change much at all. Unless the series is leading up to a planned conclusion involving the bet, the cross-dressing angle seems an odd insertion.

More is made of the nosebleeds, which I've mentioned are ramped up for comedic effect, but are also played straight. Several times Kanako passes out because of a bloody nose and has to go to the nurse's office to recover. In a universe where the dorm leader can apparently control the weather and is ageless and a fellow student can pull out a centrifuge out of her pocket it seems out of place that there would be actual consequences of her perversion. Or maybe it's just Rule of Funny by subverting expectations.

Anyway, this is a comedy and it is very much possible to overanalyze a simple comedy (and for God's sake, Spaced wasn't even that good), so I'll end here.

The Year in Crazy Part 80

2011-07-13T13:37:00.003-05:00

Yes, it's another post on Casey Anthony. No, I still don't care about what actually happened and I'm not wasting time or energy on self-righteous indignation about how the jurors are morons and should go to jail or some such nonsense like that. The day after I wrote this post I got a few more editorial cartoons along the line of "Justice is blind, are the jurors?" but I didn't bother writing them up because I was trying to move on.

But earlier this week this story broke:

The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, says the Casey Anthony trial is proof that American courts aren't proper venues for trials of suspected terrorists.

"We found with the Caylee Anthony case how difficult it is to get a conviction in a U.S. court," McConnell said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday."

Turtle Man was addressing the announced move of an accused Somali terrorist from a Navy ship to the court system. OH NOES! HE'S GOING TO WALK FREE! CONVICTIONS ARE IMPOSSIBLE IN OUR SOCIETY, CASEY ANTHONY PROVES IT!

Fucktard. Coward. Un-American.

And I'm going to stop there before I go off ranting again.

The Year in Crazy Part 79: Stupid cartoonists

2011-07-07T10:28:00.003-05:00

I don't know how long the Casey Anthony trial was going on before the verdict was announced this week. It's a perfect example of tabloid, sensationalist tripe that Nancy Grace trumpets and which the media shits themselves over because they don't have to do any real journalism and they can just bring on any number of 'experts' they want to say whatever pops into their head and they label it as 'commentary.'

So yeah, I avoided the entire fucking thing. In fact, until this morning I didn't even know what she was on trial for.

Apparently she was accused of killing her child, and she was acquitted. I know this because the editorial cartooning world (which is about 90% hacks who always love a no-brainer cartoon (and no celebrities died recently)) seized upon this OBVIOUS MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE that a woman who we knew was guilty (Nancy Grace told us!) is going to walk.

I was tweeting the most egregious examples (there were a couple legitimately funny ones about America's tabloid obsession) just a moment ago and I lost count of them. I had to go back and open all of them in separate tabs. Seven. SEVEN different people who apparently have no respect for the Sixth Amendment or the fact that a right to trial by jury is one of the fundamental rights this country is built upon.

For the record, here's the full text of the Sixth Amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Back in the 18th century this was a revolutionary idea (no pun intended), the idea that everyone had the right to face their accusers and defend themselves and the requirement that GUILT BE PROVEN before they face any punishment.

And yet today, in the 21st fucking century, we have a significant portion of Americans who don't understand this concept, or they don't like it. These ignorant, and dare I say un-American, motherfuckers with their demand for instant gratification want to see anyone accused of a crime get what they deserve, and they see trials as an impediment to this just like they see Miranda rights or a requirement to get a warrant to search a house as impediments because "the system doesn't work" or "we're too soft on criminals" or some other bullshit from people that like to posture how they're tough on crime or they're Serious People, unlike those idealist liberals who want to coddle criminals and let terrorists into the country and apologize to America's enemies.

Maybe I got off topic there a little, but I think it's all related. People so easily give into this emotional gut response about punishing evil-doers and putting up this front that they're stronger and more serious than others because they call for blood more fervently, because they're willing to undermine more rights and invade more countries and cross more lines to get those evil people! The reaction to the Casey Anthony trial is just a smaller version of a scene in 24 where Jack Bauer chews out a lawyer defending someone accused of having terrorist connections, or getting in someone's face because they won't let him torture the suspect they just arrested. We know she's guilty! We know she did it! She needs to be punished now! If she gets away it's because those weak-ass pansies and Constitutional lawyers let her get away!

So anyway, onto the cartoons. Several of them went with a direct comparison to the last 'miscarriage' of justice (ie. the person wasn't found guilty when we so desperately wanted them to be), OJ Simpson verdict:

-Steve Benson apparently sees some political connection here? An Anthony/Simpson ticket, I guess?
-Chip Bok is still a shitty, shitty artist who can't even manage to use the right colors. At first I thought this was Bob Hope pulling an oxygen tank behind him.
-Michael Ramirez, no surprise, made the comparison as well, only this time he went straight for the people responsible: those damn jurors who don't believe the prosecution proved Anthony was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Don't they watch Nancy Grace!?!
-And finally, here's the most shameless, courtesy of Don Wright.

And then we have a pair of cartoons that go with the most obvious joke: Justice is blind, otherwise this wouldn't have happened. Though how she's reading the news when she has a blindfold on, I don't know.

And finally I don't know what this one is trying to say. I think it's meant to be a Rorschach test and you the reader are to insert your own meaning. Are they stupefied by the amount of media attention? Are they shocked and bewildered by the acquittal? Do they not know who Casey Anthony is and they're confused by the unseen interviewer's question about their reaction to the verdict?

***

And this one is unrelated to Casey Anthony, but it deserves recognition for how incredibly stupid it is. ELECTIONS DON'T CREATE NUCLEAR WEAPONS! In fact, along with Asay's other recent cartoons (Fully grown babies being thrown into garbage cans in broad daylight! Rich people being beated by President Obama for having too much money!) it seems he's more interested in becoming a one-stop shopping center for ridiculous strawmen than in actually making a coherent argument.