Not now, son; I'm doing SCIENCE!

2010 is here, and yet the future is nowhere in sight.

Where is my jetpack?

You know as well as I that this is a ridiculous sort of sentiment, yet let's examine it for a minute. This isn't something I say idly because when the clock struck midnight on the 31st/1st, all the cars on Waikiki beach didn't take flight; this is something that I feel deeply and truthfully. I don't really feel like I'm living in 2010 because, frankly, I was promised better than this. Now, it's easy enough to say where the ideas I have about the future come from, ie. Science Fiction, probably the 1950s in particular. Where, however, does this wacky teleological view of history come from, the idea that our world exists more or less to create the flying automobile and Jetsonian megalopolis? Doesn't a fixed view of the future undermine entirely the sense of wonder at the future which futurism works so hard to create? There can be merit in making particular predictions about the future, the people and objects that we will encounter someday, but the purpose of such speculation is to open the mind to the manifold possibilities available, not tie them down to one vision of what our lives are going to look like in a decade or a century's time! So why the idea that we need jetpacks and flying cars? I might wonder if I'm the only one who actually believes such, but all I need do to discredit this angle is look at the cover of Popular Science. Which is incidentally something else which bears a certain amount of consideration: look at the marvellous inventions foretold on every sensational cover of that magazine, and I bet you'll find that an easy 50% never came to any kind of fruition. What is that like for a reading public and an editorial staff, to form this culture of the never-will-be, all blue-balled over domestic robots they'll never get to use and fusion power that's always fifty years away (if you'll forgive the puerile metaphor)? Is it maybe strangely gratifying to be wrong all the time, so that the future is still an adventure (for imagine just how agonizing it would be to watch progress that you had already predicted occurring in real-time!)?

And there it is: why on Earth would we WANT to have been right about the future? Sure, it's frustrating that cars don't fly, but at this point it's probably better that they never do, because it would be pretty disappointing for it to have taken us so long just to do something we'd already been daydreaming about for half a century or more. I figure you've probably imagined your 10 best things to do in a flying car, so you'd do them and then you'd be bored. Well, ok you'd have a flying car and at the age that my peers and I are, a car is pretty neat, but the imaginary spark is all but dead, I figure. So: why can't I shake the notion that since it's 2010, I should see cars flying all over the place, or that I should be vacationing in a hotel at Earth-Moon L-1, or that the stove should be talking to me? The closest thing to an answer that I've come up with so far is that in some cases - ie. cures for various forms of cancer - the apathetic sort of "I'll take the future as it comes" attitude seems callous. The waiting is painful, but that's no reason to give up on waiting for still-better crops (although with the advent of terminator seeds we are now in the unenviable position of watching a procession of worse and worse crops). This is hardly as defensible a mindset when it comes to luxury items, but even something so ostensibly frivolous as manned space travel can be crucial to securing a real future for humankind, one better than a plackard in an alien museum of archaeology. Then these are primarily political opinions, voiced in the form "I wish we could invent x so that y part of the human condition would no longer afflict us and we could have utopia.". The flying car and the jetpack are perhaps then expressions of desire for a world in which personal transportation affords the individual new freedoms and power over his or her environment. And indeed, what vehicle could be more personal than the jetpack. Sadly, the golden age of the automobile (at least in North America) is back in the '50s and '60s along with the rest of our quaint ideas about the future. Would the flying car or jetpack ignite a raygun-renaissance, or have our passions changed too much from when we first dreampt these things?

This talk of the future makes for an easy segue into a New Year's resolution which I am considering: be more transhuman this year.

Are you quite finished laughing yet?

Again, I'm thinking over what it would mean in this day and age to pursue a transhumanist lifestyle without a great many of the innovations required. Do I join some online community of the aspiring H+? That's a little like the converted signing up to be preached to, in some ways. I was thinking that I might start by actually participating in some online communities, but I dunno if that's really being "transhuman". I guess the socialite who magnifies the power of his or her gossip a thousandfold with the internet is certainly, uh, augmented by technology, but now we're back to something akin to the cyborg debate in my last post: sure it might technically qualify, but it lacks the cool factor which is - I would argue - a more relevant barometer to most people when you throw around terminology from the future. Now, building an augmented reality rig to wear in daily life? Now that's something! The tech is most certainly out there, and it seems to be getting cheaper (I saw a set of video-glasses for under $300 in an online store, and while they were pitifully low-res you could use them with anything from a laptop to an iPhone). If just about everything I do filters through a layer of technology before it gets to me, that's pretty trans-human, right? Of course, this is a pretty expensive resolution, and by no accident would involve the purchase of plenty of lusted-after tech gear. Despite the commercialization of just about every holiday, I'm not sure if "buy myself better" is a legitimate resolution for this - or any - new year. Without money, however, I'm left without the (more portable) tech that I'm supposed to be merging with to become greater than human, and so this is one resolution I may have to scrap. Still, suggestions welcome!

More thoughts on 2010 and pictures from my vacation in Hawaii still to come!

-LOUD!

"Take control of the input, and you shall become master of the output"

A popular gambit among my friends in games of Apples to Apples is to go for broke on "Pond Scum". That card has a track record of victories that would have made Napoleon green with envy. Turns out that pond scum is actually more fantastic than we had previously imagined. You see, a gene first isolated in a certain variety of pond scum is a key component of the emerging field of Optogenetics.  What's optogenetics? Why, it is all about controlling genetically-modified cellular matter...



...with LASERS.
(Well, most any light source of the correct wavelength[s] will do.)

 "What's so exciting about that - besides the lasers, of course?" you ask?
How 'bout super-precise mind-machine interfacing? It turns out that direct electrical stimulation of the brain tends to excite more neurons than you actually want to activate. Optogeneticists have added markers to their inserted genes for light-sensitivity such that they will only be active in the desired type of neuron, and can infect relatively small areas of brain tissue with the retrovirii that deliver the genes. The upshot? It is now possible to activate very specific groups of neurons in the brain. It gets better: toss in a gene that makes neurons glow (green, it turns out) when they're active, and you have an equally-precise mind-reading technology. Two-way communication between the brain and external machinery is a huge milestone in cybernetics, and it is within our reach now.

In a recent discussion about the feasability and desireability of cybernetic enhancement, a friend of mine argued that the major disadvantage of cybernetics (as opposed to external enhancements, ie. powered exoskeletons) is obsolesence. Who wants to have a set of electrodes implanted in their brain if they'll need replacement with the next model in three weeks' time? What strikes me about this new technology is that adding this send/receive technology to the brain is done by retroviral engineering. I'm a little fuzzy about the particulars, but I think it's conceivable that should an enhanced version of these genes be developed, it could be as simple as just another few injections. Ok, so they're injections RIGHT INTO YOUR BRAIN...but I think I'd take that over really really really invasive surgery to stick metal permanently in there. I hope that's how it'll work, anyhow.

I'm getting ahead of myself, of course. The early applications for this breakthrough are mostly therapeutic. Still, it's good to know that the inventors do have their priorities straight.

Now, I suppose the only question is : how long will it be until Nintendo and Microsoft start building this tech into gimmicky, over-hyped game control systems?

-Loud!

Once in a Blue Moon

To anyone who still bothers to read this, I have something to say: go see a little movie called 'Moon'. It's a little bit like someone threw 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Sixth Day, and Solaris into a blender, but with a little less budget and a little more charm. If you think you're the kind of person who is lost at "low-budget sci-fi film", please don't be; Moon is not made of cheese. Aesthetically, it straddles the border between 2001 and Alien(s) (according to Wikipedia, Moon's director worked with the supervising model builder of the latter). The insides of the moonbase in which most of the film takes place are painted in the bright whites of Kubrick's science-fiction masterpiece, but the worn edges and grime would be more befitting of a Wayland-Yutani outpost. The occasional lens flare might remind the viewer unpleasantly of the newest Star Trek film, but the effect is used far more sparingly here. Interesting to note is the anachronism of CRT displays being employed in a futuristic moon base, as if the film were from some previous decade. The retro-futuristic tones are oddly cheerful for a story so dark as that of Moon, and they provide I think a good contrast. There is a certain irony in Moon and other films or stories of its ilk, in which characters are placed in a future which is just as we hope it will be, and it is just business as usual for them. We dream of escaping this world, but not even an astronaut can escape the daily grind.

In Moon, the daily grind has driven the protagonist a little crazy over three years less two weeks spent alone on the dark side of the moon with only an artificially intelligent computer (voiced by Kevin Spacey doing a HAL 9000 impression) for company. Par for the course, until he hallucinates his way into a vehicular accident on the lunar surface. He awakes in the infirmary, and begins the process of discovering that he is not quite what he thought he was. Moon is a moving tale with a message that actually credits the viewer with a little intelligence; much of the exposition that would be painfully and directly hashed out in dialogue is expressed visually or can be inferred but is never said. Truly it is a beautiful thing when a film is allowed to speak for itself.

I could go on, but I would likely require repeated viewings to speak very intelligently about the composition (these things are hard to do when one is not a veteran film critic), and the more I say the more I risk spoiling some little detail that you would have had so much fun discovering on your own. So please, go down to the world exchange plaza and see this movie. The people who made it deserve your money, and you deserve entertainment of this calibre.

"I don't want to set the world on fire..."

A day or so before Fallout 3 was released, I took a gander at the copy of the game manual that STEAM provided. It was part of my vetting process, along with watching and re-watching the five gameplay videos, as I decided whether or not I would make a purchase in the end. The introduction to the manual proposes that we find the idea of a nuclear aftermath compelling because history has no analogous situation for us to reflect on. I think that while this may be so, the real reason that we find stories set in the armageddon's aftermath is easy to discern when you observe who the characters are...or rather, what they are: Human (or something like it). With the exception of something like On the Beach, the moment you see a human form wandering the irradiated wastelands you know that no matter how terrifying you find the idea of a nuclear holocaust there is, at least in this fictional universe, hope for the future of our kind. Self-evident in the term “post-apocalypse” is the concept of something after The End of all Things. It's not a perfect analogue to “afterlife” - more like “afterdeath” but we could take that to mean the same thing anyway - nevertheless the idea behind both terms is the same: they exist to comfort us with the hope that after we, and others pass on (whether one by one or en masse), there will be something, more accurately someone to carry on thereafter.

As you have probably surmised by now, I am now a proud Fallout 3 owner. I have yet to finish the game, but I decided to offer a compilation of my first, second, and third impressions (in plain terms, I've played I would guess about 10 hours of the game so far. The time counter seems to be bugged here under Linux, but I will edit this post with the exact information sometime later today EDIT: Steam's time counter is messed up in Windows as well. Fortunately the game keeps count and tells me that as of the time I was writing this my playtime was 15:14:08). I'm not a huge consumer of post-apocalyptic fiction, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for the stuff. I have not played either Fallout 1, nor Fallout 2. I think this is a valuable perspective to have when considering a game, as are those of a diehard Fallout fan, and a Mad-Max junkie as well. What I want to address is whether or not Fallout 3 is a good game on its own merits.

The narrative structure of the initial character creation phase (which begins with your birth) is very linear, but also very compelling. I don't want to give away the details, but suffice it to say Bethesda did a very clever job of integrating character creation into the setting, and into the game. From almost the get-go, you can be a sappy, golly-gee-whiz good guy, or a right prick to everyone. There are about three options for any dialogue (sound familiar, anyone?), with the moderate response representing a range from neutral-good to lawful neutral (in D&D terms). While it is nice to have a legitimate alternative to ridiculous altruism (for reference, my play style tends to be “I'll be really nice about doing stuff for you, but I'm not going to say no to payment. Energy cells for my Laser pistol don't grow on trees, dammit!), I think that the game could stand to alter your options as you establish a character to give the player a greater range of options from his or her chosen moral stance. Even while playing a very-good “Ranger of the Wastes”, I still have the option in many dialogues to say what amounts to “time to die, punk!”. While this does help if you like to play schizophrenic characters (see previous posts on gaming), I'm not sure if it helps most gamers. The way I hear it, a lot of gamers tend to play through once as the good guy (to complete the game), and then once they're sick to death of getting missions from every NPC from here to Beijing, they roll up the good 'ol Hitler-Skeletor hybrid and CRUSH THE PUNY PLEBES WHERE THEY STAND. So the utility of an evil response for a player who is being good (or vice versa) isn't really apparent. They could at least replace it with something more polite that wouldn't cost you Karma if slaying someone could be justified, ie. “I am forced to purge the wasteland of your malevolence forever!”. I think that such an approach wouldn't require rewriting much dialogue, and it would be helpful to players who want to feel very heroic when they declare that it is time for a villainous cretin to MEET HIS TIMELY END.

So, once you leave the vault (again, play the game if you want story/details), the game opens up and presents you with a substantial map, your first main quest goal, and a whole lot of autonomy. Sure you can go to the nearby town to make some inquieries, but you don't really have to. I suppose it would be a little hard for a character using primarily ranged weapons to forego the first opportunity to stock up on ammunition, but I digress. Like its sibling Oblivion, Fallout 3 has fast-travel, but with the caveat that you must first “discover” a destination by hoofing it there. I find this an ideal balance, because it makes questing quite painless without removing the need for exploration. It's also awesome when you're low on health, although this is a mixed blessing. It seems that your fast-travelling and even naps in potentially-hostile territory aren't ever interrupted by baddies along the way. While this will prevent a lot of irritating deaths for characters who are low on stimpacks and various irradiated foods, it makes the world feel less dangerous than it should, in a way. If I sleep in the ramshackle base of some bandits I just killed, I almost expect to be dragged awake by some punk or super mutant who wants to bag my carcass. It could be that this is a feature of higher difficulties (I am on the default in this game, I will report back with further information when I have it), but reserving an immersive feature from the default experience of the game I would find a questionable design choice.

If you've seen any reviews of Fallout 3 thus far, you've probably heard two constants: 1) V.A.T.S. Is the S.H.I.T., and there are some animation/AI glitches. Both are true. The Vaultec-Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) is not only the coolest, but the most excellent solution I have ever seen to the whole stats-versus-twitch accuracy problem in RPG shooters. Too much reliance on stats will make good shooter players feel like something isn't right in the engine as their perfectly-aimed shots fly wide due to behind the scenes dice rolls, and too much reliance on a player's FPS sk1llz will alienate less-dextrous folk who want to roleplay a straight-shootin' badass. Fallout 3 in its real-time mode is a little too stat-based for my tastes, I think (although it could just be that my utterly wrecked post-apocalyptic 10mm sidearm or laser pistol isn't all that precise). V.A.T.S. Does two important things: it pauses the game, and it tells you what % chance you have of hitting your intended body part/ target (you can shoot their weapon, if you like, and once you deal it enough damage it flies out of their hands!). You queue up attacks based on your Action Points (AP), which regenerate at a decent pace in real-time combat. Once you've set up all your attacks, you tap the use key, and watch as they are carried out in slow-motion from the obligatory DRAMATIC CAMERA ANGLES. While the game occasionally shows you a nonsensical view for watching what you just did (ie, missed), it's pretty awesome about letting you see just how incredibly dead you shot that guy when you score that critical hit. Squeamish? DO NOT PLAY FALLOUT 3. I must confess that I'm one of those weird dudes who takes it kind of personally when things (even AI-controlled ones) are trying to kill me in games, so it's pretty incredibly gratifying to watch in slow-mo as they are blasted asunder (often literally so) by my laser beams, bullets, or whatever. I've just taken the “Bloody Mess” perk at level 8 which increases the intensity of carnage you cause (AND grants you +5% damage with EVERYTHING), so I'll report back on just how brutal it gets. As for the AI and animation glitches, I'm hoping that Bethesda can patch these, as it tends to detract from immersion when that badass super mutant with the chaingun can't or won't turn to face you when you strafe him, allowing you to blast him repeatedly without reprisal, or when characters try to walk into walls before the game helpfully shunts them free of the obstacle. For a company that brags about having the most lifelike AI engine out there, they have a bit of 'splainin' to do.

There is a lot more that I want to say about Fallout 3, but since I really have to get some sleep or risk dozing through morning class will leave for tomorrow or a final review. If you want a recommendation, it's a qualified yes. It's a pretty fantastic experience so far, but if you've got a problem with contemporary RPGs, it won't change your mind. Despite its unique flavour and setting, there's something about the way Fallout 3 feels that makes it not so different from, say, Mass Effect. The dialogue is less cinematic, the combat moreso, and Fallout is on the whole better-executed, but pausable combat? The same “Yes-Maybe-No” dialogue options? Excruciatingly pretty graphics? A less-than-stellar inventory management system as a console-ation to those people playing with an utterly WRONG input device (although at least Fallout 3 doesn't force you to reduce surplus stock into useless omni-gel, and it organizes your items alphabetically)? It's all there! This isn't so much to say that Fallout 3 = a better Mass Effect*, so much as to impress upon people that you're still a glorified errand boy or girl (or mass murderer[ess], if that's how you roll) with some real kickass toys and a whole lot of terrain to explore. The wheel remains steadfastly un-re-invented (while this particular phrasing of the old idiom is clunky to be sure, keep the idea in mind, it will be relevant to an impending post when I tackle some non-videogame-related material. Stay tuned!)

-LOUD!

*although it's definitely true that Fallout 3 is just better than Mass Effect.

In Defense of Farscape

(Etarran-style rejected title: "Lay off my favourite TV show, you frelling dren-faced farbot phillistines!")

It has been the policy of certain “friends” of mine – for exactly how long I cannot say – to make fun of/ get a rise out of me by disparaging the Australo-American Sci-Fi/Comedy/Romance masterpiece, Farscape. While this not-particularly-good-natured teasing is very little about the show itself (few of these “friends” of mine have seen so much as an episode. In an unprecedented feat of being absolutely no fun at all, one claims to have seen an entire season and not found it enjoyable), I would not be writing this post merely to bitch about the means by which they cause me distress*. My worry in this matter is for their sake, and not my own; I fear that should they not already accept their petty fabrications as the honest truth by virtue of endless repetition, they soon will. More than anything I am distressed by the idea that these otherwise intelligent and humourous individuals would predispose themselves against the pure, unadulterated joy that is Farscape. It almost did it to myself, years ago, and I cannot in good faith allow them to do the same.

*I would be blogging about Star, were that my purpose here.

It was my mother, of all people, who first brought Farscape to my attention. I was actively disinterested in this low-budget australian muppety romance...thing, and can you blame me? The recommendation had come to my dear mum by way of a romance readers news group, for crying out loud! I'm not known for being a good sport, so I suspect it was a pointed reminder about the (flawless) track record of mom in recommending fiction in literature or on screen that had me grudgingly agree to watch an episode. It took maybe half of that episode for me to figure out that not only had I lost a potential counterexample for those times when my parents would bring icky, boring looking movies home to their infernally infallible chorus of “you'll like it!”, I had also discovered a kickass TV series. And so it was that Friday nights in our house became synonymous with Farscape...a glorious tradition that lasted until the bastard network execs canceled it for a “drop in ratings” in season 4**, leaving us among the legions of angry, heartbroken fans (Farscape's writing team having no warning to modify their final episode to achieve closure meant for Season 5 resulted in the most egregious cliffhanger finale EVER -spoiler After four years of torturous uncertainty and sexual tension, the main characters agree to be married. Also she is pregnant with his child. Also he has been forced to cut his one remaining connection to Earth (a wormhole) due to circumstances arising from flowers, careless words, and a small nuclear explosive...and then they, in their little rowboat are spotted by an alien starfighter and reduced to an equivalent mass of small, marble-sized pebbles by some esoteric weapon, THE END /spoiler)

.**I'm not a census bureau, but I know that the show became rather more arc-based in its final season, hence some casual viewers would have reason to balk. The third season was also marginally stronger, but it's not as if that's unique to Farscape.

The question you may be asking with regards to this post, besides “why bother?”, is probably something along the lines of “ok, but what was it that made Farscape so good?”. This is an excellent question, which is perhaps best answered by the show itself. As a Jim Henson production, Farscape was a fundamentally positive show. It was about the value of friendship (incidental note on the acting: this is from the episode where everyone is being driven mad, and not indicative of the acting in the series-at-large):

it was a work of subtle, intellectual humour:

A show that stressed the importance of nonviolence in all things:



...And which featured the best obligatory-episode-where-everyone-swaps-bodies of them all (note: at this point in the episode, Crichton (the human) inhabits Aeryn(the hot space Aussie)'s body):

I am somewhat constrained by what the fans have managed to upload so far, which seems to be a pretty random assortment, so what's there isn't really my ideal range of clips, but it will have to suffice for the moment. It's mostly fun and games above, but the show does shine equally in its silly and serious segments. Moreover, there really is a Jim Henson vibe to be found underneath the layers of twisted muppets, sex and violence. There is a real message about the value of peace, friendship, and love in a universe so full of evil things. It's perhaps more overt in the Peacekeeper Wars miniseries (a paltry 4 hours where Season 5 would have gone, but they made pretty epic use of those hours), but if you watch the series, it's there. The trademark Jim Henson glee is there, even in the darkest episodes. Farscape is a show where you cannot imagine that anyone on stage isn't having a blast at any given time, because they are acutely aware of just how awesome this thing they are part of is. You and I both know another show of which this is true, a show that you don't needlessly malign. A show that was also canceled well before it's time.

That's right, Drive – I mean, uh – Firefly, of course!

-LOUD!

PS. I suppose the one thing you could say against Farscape is that while Jim Henson could demonstrably get David Bowie to act in their stuff (Labrynth, for people who live under rocks), I don't recall ever seeing him on Farscape. Possible Explanation: it would have created a singularity of pure awesome and destroyed Television.

o/ lord I was born a ramblin' writer/speaker/thinker o/

BOOBtubeS!

I think it's more than safe to say that of all media, television is the most maligned. Forget Shakespeare's lowbrow roots, forget about the harlequin romance, the incessant repetition of this year's "hits" on 9/10 radio stations, Meet the Spartans...the pollution brought by these wretched works doesn't seem to contaminate their respective art forms the way we have allowed bad television to colour everything we see and hear on the good ol' boob tube (even though most network TV is too tame to show anything remotely resembling the actual female breast...). Videogaming is I think a close second, despite the best efforts of self-appointed moral crusaders. At least games are known to improve co-ordination and problem-solving skills. Television gets pretty much zero good press as a medium.

Which is why it's so awful that I am a sucker for good TV.

If I'm tired enough, I'm a sucker for just about any TV, but that's neither here nor there. No, I'm talking about Farscape, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica (remake), Cowboy BeBop, jPod...intelligent TV. I might as well toss in Mythbusters, Magic School Bus, Robot Chicken, Popular, Buffy, Heroes, and Dead Like Me, while I'm in a listing mood. These shows are all different, but they can be collected into groups, sometimes overlapping. You've straight-up solid writing, acting, and wit; you've got pertinent social commentary; educational value; comedy, romance, psychosis: you have art.

When you think about it, TV is the perfect mirror for society: sure, a lot of it is made with very little thought input, or a great deal of thought is put in to ensure that very little comes out, but either way, a lot of it is the bland homogeneity and routine - filler - required as if by law to stop the masses from discovering existentialism (gotta keep your power sources safely plugged in, after all). But there's always that small, rogue band of people who keep thought alive, with such alien concepts as "plot", "character", and "cinematography". I may be overly melodramatic in casting TV as some kind of socio-political battlefield, but maybe there's something to it. Television has, like Religion, been called "the opiate of the masses", after all. It would certainly explain why intelligent TV tends to get cancelled with alarming regularity: get too subversive, and the Capitalist Oppressor takes you off the airwaves. I think Heroes, Galactica and Farscape managed to hang on (although the latter was cancelled after 4 seasons) by having a strong emphasis on family, which the conservatives must like enough to make up for their boldness elsewhere. Looking deeper, I guess Heroes and Galactica both feature powerful elites making decisions that affect the fate of humanity, and they generally tend to make the right choices. The powerful elites must like that vindication.

So, with new TV comes a new cast of shows to be examined, the ones I've seen at all would be jPod (already in the list of intelligent TV, and duly cancelled), the Sarah Connor Chronicles (which I think survives on overtones of family and religion, as per my theory), and finally Eli Stone, which I'm still evaluating. On the one hand, they did do an episode where a vaccine maker was trying to hide the fact that it's products could cause Autism (dumb, 'cause that myth does not need more support: note how the vast majority of people are non-autistic and immunized? Yeah, I thought you might enjoy your health). This week, though, was much better: they totally took the US government to task for only funding the LIES of Abstinence-only "sex education"! On TV, in front of (hopefully) millions of viewers. I like their style this week, although I wonder if they mean to educate, or just to provoke a different group every week by subverting their usual message somehow? Also, the whole "Eli-as-prophet" storyline has the potential to get really, really annoying and preachy if done wrong.

I guess the bottom line is that Eli Stone has Natasha Henstridge, which should keep at least the male viewers, even in the event of severe shark-jumping.

More on this as my artistic appraisal continues. I think I may just go and watch some more Battlestar Galactica Season 3 (which you should buy or rent or borrow and watch and no they are not paying me, unless you count the part where they're making more for me to watch)

LOUD!

I should get elected just so I can deliver the joke at the end of this post!

No subheading here, because my inclination toward any given topic isn't really enough to justify coming up with a semi-witty remark about it, only to veer off track within the space of a paragraph or so. How 'bout them apples?

Speaking of Apple?

Actually, Steve Jobs seems to have been quiet of late.

Speaking of late, Arthur C Clarke

Unfortunately, neither magic nor sufficiently advanced technology was on hand to save him. Anyone get a tissue sample? I mean it! Overlooking the questions of nurture vs nature, and the fact that there's no way to salvage the original consciousness of the man, SOME part of the man deserves a place on Mars, in space, somewhere. In the meantime, I hope they buried him in a 1x4x9 black stone coffin. That would be EPIC!

Speaking of Epic, a lot of PC gamers were distraught at the notion that the Unreal engine is now being iterated with each new generation of consoles. What else are they supposed to do? Consoles don't get any better over their lifetimes in terms of hardware, and it would be economic suicide to screw over a large demographic by releasing a new engine they can't use for another three years. Also, the cycle is a decent fit for PC, because note that just recently have U-engine-3 capable computers come into the proper midrange price range. What SHOULD be bothering people are gameplay concessions to the consoles. So in a few years we MIGHT be complaining that UE3 is starting to show its age, suppose by then even entry-level PCs are capable of playing games based on said. That's a clear win for PC gaming, even if the elite doesn't see it that way. Besides, just 'cause cryengine 2 is PC-exclusive didn't seem to help Crysis...Bioshock (dumbed down from it's parent though it was) was still the better game!

Speaking of Bioshock, check out this article on a presentation by Ken Levine about the process of creating the story. What always gets me when I read about game development are the outtakes. It isn't the same as watching DVD outtakes, where you can see where the scene failed, and the lack of polish doesn't help either. No, it's a window into the brainstorming process from whence sprang the game you have come to love, and the lack of polish helps these raw ideas shine. You generally don't get to play outtakes, so you don't get the same understanding of why certain elements failed to entertain, so in the end you're left with what still sounds like a really good idea, one that should have been in the game. I think Bioshock might have been improved by the inclusion of some pre-and during-civil war gameplay, although fitting that into the experience of a SPOILER ALERT amnesiac genetically-modified mind-controlled assassin-baby SPOILER OVER who was never likely a member of Rapturian society would have been a monumental challenge. Perhaps as a more intense form of the "genetic memories" which in Bioshock manifest as ghosts? For more examples of this sort of thing, see Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, and for that matter probably any decently thorough book or PDF or what-have-you chronicling game development.

Speaking of development, I had to do a presentation on a paper I wrote about Edward Abbey (a noted opponent of development in his beloved American Southwest) in my first-year seminar today. A funny thing I noticed, and I can't tell which side this is evidence for, but in the novel I am reading - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars - the position of those opposed to Terraforming is a very close match to the terrestrial philosophies of Abbey himself, and yet I have not seen any acknowledgment of Abbey in the novel or dedication or anywhere. Given the effects Abbey has had on people, notably EarthFirst!, or any of his biographers, or for that matter probably anyone who met him, it seems likely his influence would be noted. I suppose I should be happy, because I am arguing a position against his having fundamentally changed understandings of the environment (He affected people, no doubt, and he was an environmentalist, but he wasn't bringing anything new to the table, he was a King Ludd for '60's America, is effectively my argument).

Speaking of arguments...actually, I haven't really participated in any good ones lately, for that matter, I haven't overheard any either. Used to be that I'd overhear neat conversations on almost any given OC transpo bus

Speaking of buses, would the suburbs and rural communities PLEASE stop their bloody pissing and moaning about the transit service (or lack thereof)? We should not be giving incentives for people to splay bits of our city all about the countryside and pollute, pollute, pollute their way to work every damn morning of every day! With the stain of our childish and often tedious federal politics upon us, perhaps Ottawa will never actually be considered a "fun" city, but the least we can do is make it less unpleasant for ourselves. We need architects who understand aesthetics, for one, and we need city planners who make plans with nary a mention of the words "growth", "suburbia", and "strip mall"! Also, we need pride that isn't wounded by the likes of Winnipeg cockwagging at us about how theirs is longer. Unfortunately, we bought into the phallic hype of our own lengthy skateway, and cannot hide behind witty retorts such as - and this would have been a good comeback as a newspaper headline, I think - "Everyone Knows Girth Matters More!". At the very least we should take some proper revenge on whatever bitch MP decided it was worth bragging about the Winnipeg skateway in the Fucking House of Commons. Seriously, what the hell?

Ottawans, you know what to do, but seriously stay away from physical violence, and other similarly overt tactics. Write your MP, and see if he or she would be interested in dissing Winnipeg in question period, or something. Be creative in your suggestions. Better still, see if they'd be interested in dissing HER for it. Off the top of my head, I think you could go somewhere with some inverse-Freudian humour about "Canal envy". Ours gave birth to a town, theirs is rough and frigid. ZING!

LOUD!

"Come with me if you want to live!"

Simple Arithmetic

Lena Headey + Summer Glau + the Terminator mythos - Ahnold = why YOU should be watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It's a good show on the Fox network, which does mean invariable cancellation, but before it is -and this must be said - terminated, give it a whirl. Summer Glau is a lucid, mechanical badass this time around, stealing scenes like the unholily-talented acting bandit she is. Lena Headey steps boldly into the be-all and end-all of "yo mama wears army boots" jokes as the titular Sarah Connor, and she's a worthy successor to Linda Hamilton, I'd say. John Connor is present, and a major focus of the series, but as a 15-year-old, he's basically there to be angsty, provide motivation for his mom, as well as tender, heartfelt family moments for the viewers (and doubtless for the Fox people, neo-con bastards that they are).

While the acting is quality stuff, the show as an experience is so far operating like the Terminator movies: there's a good-guy robot, a host of bad-guy robots, and there are the police looking for an armed-and-dangerous nutjob mother (or so they think). This isn't a complaint as of yet, because I and the writers both know that something has to happen besides car chases and teary mother-son hugfests, but the pilot episodes have to be just that in order to sell. That's fine, that's what you do to sell TV... I mean, look at Drive: you try to do car chases AND intelligent storytelling AND character development ALL AT THE SAME TIME? That's madness! How is the average Fox-watching Yokel supposed to wrap his poor little noodle around all that com-plex-uh-teeee and new-aunce? Given time, I'm sure that all of these will make due appearances in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, so seriously, watch it so the writers have a chance to a) get a fair deal and write more episodes, and b) tell a part of the story with some kind of actual resolution, before Fox puts their mechanical, humanity-crushing boots to it!

Critical Thinking

It's just occurred to me how incredibly apt "Critical Thinking" is as a term. I wonder if there are words for phrases like that? I'll put forward "pseudo-autological", and leave it at that for now. It just so happens that I am taking a course on critical thinking at university now, and I realized in class today that I'm going to need some new words if I'm going to be able to express myself adequately. For example, one student raised a point in class, that defining "morally right actions" as "actions which maximize pleasure for those affected" (which was NOT the debate) was a functional (I think that was it) definition, in that it did not address what "morality" is itself, only what would constitute morality. I wanted to say that his objection was only valid if one acknowledged some kind of special meaning for "moral". For someone who does not believe in any special, independent existence of a moral code, couldn't a functional definition also be a definition of the word "moral" itself, in the absence of some greater significance? I don't think I had a word to indicate that I meant the phrase itself would define the very concept of what moral is in the non-presence of an absolute, but I think it would have greatly helped the clarity of my response. I also want words for "existence-that-isn't-actually-existence", as in "something that isn't NOT, but cannot be said to exist as you or I perceive reality and the universe to be present" (an entirely hypothetical conjecture that I used when hypothesizing about how God is the ultimate expression of the "freedom to..." philosophy. While I'm on that, I generally need words that define whatever...stuff...is beyond our mortal ken. Real stuff is easy, science has been name-tagging matter and energy and their myriad dances for centuries, the physical is (naturally) well-documented...but how to define hypothetical conjectures? So, consider this a sort of "wanted words" request. Submissions via email, MSN, or the comments here, if you have a good word for any of these...(non?)things. Winners get my supreme appreciation, maybe some chocolate or $5 from my pocket, and I'll try to use the word in class or conversation, see if I can't get it to stick. I reserve the right to post and popularize my own submissions, but the $5 or chocolate (or equivalent something) is going to someone else because I said so, even if I think I win.

And, lest you think I forgot, it is 2008. Still no flying cars, so it's not that big a deal.

In personal news, I have all but abandoned the quest for the bare-bones notebook. I find it appalling that in a market that must consist entirely of picky, tech-savvy people, it's actually harder to get what you want! Defeated, I look to a heavy upgrade for my desktop, and perhaps a Smartphone purchase. One day, I will have my hardcore custom gaming laptop, but that day isn't coming with any great alacrity.

BY YOUR COMMAND

Hack vs Slash

I had this glorious plan, going on...two months now? It's probably been more, I may have been planning this since the summer. I wanted to buy a barebones notebook, and create from scratch my portable gaming masterpiece, as a counterpart to my fully-loaded desktop in the big aluminum box. It would mean an end to running WinXP on a slowly-failing Celeron 950 (which went over a GHz until my dad stole back the good heatsink!) with 768MB of ram (two-thirds of which is borrowed) and an ATI Radeon 9600 256MB, which is my current secondary machine in the case of basement LAN action, which happens all-too-infrequently for my tastes. Then, on top of this, I was going to buy an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, and start enjoying some 1080i content (yes, 1080i, because I have a clunky old CRT television), with the aid of one or both of my computers and a little app called AnyDVD HD.

All this comes to a crashing halt for a few reasons, the first of which being that the laptop chassis I want comes in a few flavours, and getting the precise match would involve ordering from the US, enduring possible tariffs, delivery surcharges, and all those scary things that must be keeping our domestic industry intact by making it nigh-impossible to get what you want for cheap when it's not available in Canada. I guess I could break down and buy a lesser variant of this chassis from within the country, but it would feel as much like defeat as victory. The Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, well, not so much a problem as a question of who I trust on ebay. $70 for a buy-it-now? That just sounds like too good a deal...

The real kicker is that a reasonably-priced laptop by Acer is selling for $400 off at the future shop. It has everything I want except for DVI output and an MXM module, including an HDMI port and an HD DVD drive. It costs $800, easily half of the total cost of the DIY laptop and the HD DVD drive would cost separately. I may have to give in on this score, and simply buy the DIY laptop separately, but at that point I will have spent some $2000 on laptops, which would - if spent on a single laptop - probably get me a single unit with a RAID array, 17" screen, and SLI. Maybe I should do that, instead, although I cannot for the life of me think of where I might get a laptop IDE HD DVD drive for anything less than $800 on its own.

In short, I have gone from a single decision back to start, and I have to start this process of deciding the best course of action all over again. I am not the most decicive person at the best of times, so this really helps nothing.

Maybe I'll see if I can't cajole my dad into splitting the cheap laptop with me, if I can have the HD DVD drive. Now fitting THAT into a barebone chassis would be what I'd call a fun little project. Not so much hacking involved, but I'd probably avoid buying Tor 9x screwdrivers...

In the game of Hack versus Slash, why are the big box stores out to take away all of our fun?

The Moral Compass

So I did go and see a certain fantasy movie with supposedly atheist roots, and I have to say that I'm disappointed. You'd think that if a movie were going to raise religious hackles, it could at least have the decency to be a good movie, and more importantly, to be an atheist movie. There isn't any mention of a "Creator" or "God" figure, there's not even a Big Brother. The Magesterium is churchlike only in terms of its visual style, which is great, I love how the stern-looking clergyman type is the bad dude with the poison for once, and the free thinkers are the good guys, that's AWESOME. Like Sci-Fi Channel's perplexing "Riverworld" adaptation, the movie has only made me want to read the book, because it has presented me with some cool world-building, and not a lot else, which I expect the book will fix. This is a terrible trend in movies, because libraries will let you borrow a book for free, and cliffs notes to summarize it for you don't cost as much as movie tickets and overpriced popcorn. Visually, this movie is astounding, and I would gladly give armoured bear hugs to the concept artists and digital rendering crew, fantastic work! Now if only the screenwriters could have worked a little harder, then we might actually have CONTENT! Also, it would help if Daniel Craig and his Tiger had featured more in the movie, but you can just read any old review of GC and know that.

What saddens me about this situation is that an opportunity to bring atheist messages into entertainment has been missed. I'd like some entertainment that stands up and says that you don't need Jesus, or God, or Mohammed, or 4 000-year-old books to have morals, ethics, drive, determination, life, and happiness. I'd like to see something that challenges not just arbitrary authority, but the actual tenets of religion. This is not to say that we need to go about killing God in books for this purpose: positive messages are more desireable in the end. Better still, just look at the truth: the genetics, the selection pressures, and social life. Look at why religion might be beneficial, look at how it is not, in some cases. I think it's fair to say that any imposition of belief would place us atheists in bad faith, and so rather than bonking people over the head screaming "there is no God!", just lay down interesting facts and let them draw their own conclusions, rather than giving them rhetoric and scripture. Will that win "converts"? Not many, but then it's not like converting people to atheism is all that time-critical: belief doesn't really matter if there's no afterlife, so there's no "saving" people! There is only showing them that they can take control of their own moral codes.

The Review

So I've been working on a review of BSG: Razor, but it's not really been coming together. I end up listing every little thing about it, when really I only need to get a few points across:

1) If you like BSG, it's basically more of the same. For that matter, it's an incredibly ordinary mid-series miniseries, because it introduces cool characters and events, and then blows them up or away before the audience can say "wait, why weren't they in the series proper, if this was important" WARNING! CONTAINS GIANT SPOILERS!

2) If you haven't seen BSG, you don't want to start here.

3) Admiral Cain's relationship with the cylon 6 "Gina" is the best new character development. It places the infiltrator within the crew of Pegasus, it makes Cain human, it makes her descent into cold-blooded revenge so much more understandable, and also makes her treatment of Gina all the more horrifying. Even though BSG has played with sex scenes in the past, they don't go the easy route of sexploitation of two attractive female characters. Good move on their part, because it stands out as character development, and not ratings-grab. It's also presented with no bias. The only reaction is "It's just the admiral seems so self-sufficient". Tricia Helfer and Michelle Forbes have great on-screen chemistry, which is the crowning touch to this master-stroke. Brilliance

4) I really like Admiral Cain's original XO. It makes it very painful when she shoots him. Also Brilliant!

5) The new character, Kendra Shaw, is mad, mad hot, and ohhh that accent. Pity she dies in a stupid cliché involving a nuclear bomb that must be manually detonated

6) The cylon hybrid whom she destroys (along with a basestar) is cool. Too bad we still don't understand why the Cylons were compelled to become fleshy and have religion in the first place. Hell, we haven't a clue, even. Prophecies are cool, but the series really ought to back-fill in order to shed light on the origins of the organic Cylons.

7) Speaking of clichés, we have an entire plot arc revolving around...Something Adama saw or did earlier in his career, but neglected to mention even when it would have been pertinent. Anyone remember "Bulldog"? It's as if the writer's strike forced the crew to fill in the plot with no imagination, or something. Especially that nuke thing. That's from Armageddon, and it's even sorta happened in the series already (end of season 1 ish, before Boomer shoots Adama)!

8) They could have just had a bunch of Kendra Shaw beauty shots and that one scene where the Cylon says "By your command" with all the Vocordery goodness of the original show. It would have advanced the plot of BSG about as much as Razor.

More later, I promise

LOUD!