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You will believe a droid can fly.

John Scalzi rips into Star Wars on the basis of bad design.

Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”

And over at Slashdot, some other folks respond. A sample comment that I liked:

That complaint [that Stormtroopers are crappy marksmen] always bugged me. I know of 4 occasions in Episode IV (I won’t get into the other episodes) where the stormtroopers fire at the heroes.

1. 3P0/R2 wander across the field of fire – Troopers shoot past them to get the actual targets (exactly as you would expect from trained marksmen)
2. Falcon takes off – Troopers shoot at AND HIT a vehicle moving at high speed away from them
3. Trash Compactor – Troopers aren’t able to hit a group of people taking cover a good distance off down a dark cooridor. Concealment and Camouflage but they’re able to get pretty close in the few seconds they have before they escape.
4. Deathstar Escape Scene – Troopers miss every shot at the group of rebels who are going to lead them to the rebellion base…hmm, could it be they were ordered to miss?

Every other time we see the stormtroopers fire they hit their targets perfectly.

Obvously, Scalzi was just kicking over an anthill to see the ants scurry. But I’m an ant, so I’ll scurry a bit as well! First of all, it takes a sharp eye to catch it, but R2-D2 is not stopped dead in his tracks by stairs; he is quite able to negotiate them, albeit somewhat awkwardly. But this makes clear the failing in John’s “argument” (to the extent that he has one; like I said, he’s just kicking over anthills here).

Simply put, there is a difference between bad design and something being not good at doing something it’s not designed to do. R2-D2 is not designed to trundle all over the place and climb stairs and all that. He’s designed to roll around, or be locked into place on a ship, and fix stuff. He wasn’t built with the notion in mind of bearing the stolen Death Star plans across the desert wastes of Tatooine; he wasn’t built with the notion in mind of picking his way across the bottom of a swamp on Dagobah; he wasn’t built with the notion in mind of, well, going up and down stairs. John’s complaint here sounds to me like if I were to complain that my Swiss Army knife is badly designed because it doesn’t drill holes in wood very well. (And no, R2 does not use his jets to climb stairs. He uses his legs. Watch at about the :55 mark on this video. Sure, he’s slow at it, but it’s not what he was built for.)

Likewise, if R2-D2 isn’t designed to talk to people, why would he have a voice synthesizer? This is like complaining about The Wife’s sewing machine’s onboard computer not being able to play DVDs.

One of the better comments on the difference between design and utility is in the movie Apollo 13. After the accident on the ship and the determination that there will be no moon landing and now the mission is recovery of the astronauts, a bunch of NASA Mission Control guys are in a room discussing options, and one man from the company that actually built the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) objects that the LEM is not designed to be a lifeboat; it’s designed solely for landing on the moon. And Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) snaps back, “I don’t care what anything was designed to do. I care about what it can do.”

(But just to geek out for a quick moment: the notion that Star Wars abounds with bottomless chasms unprotected by guard rails is really false, when there’s only one such locale in the movies: the power terminal that Obi Wan deactivates in A New Hope. Two things, though: that terminal is probably meant to be serviced by droids instead of humans, and droids are undoubtedly seen as expendable should they fall (and service droids probably have better balance anyway). And anyway, the Death Star later turns out to have been designed by a race of beings who have wings and can fly! Heh. OK, I’m done.)

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“One land, one king!”

Here’s a good example of something that makes clear that I’ll never understand the mindset that governs the way Hollywood does business. Apparently Bryan Singer, who was reported last week as being attached to a new Battlestar Galactica reboot movie, is also near to being attached to a project to remake John Boorman’s classic King Arthur film Excalibur:

Warner Bros. has closed a rights deal to remake the 1981 “Excalibur,” with Bryan Singer producing and developing the picture as a potential directing vehicle.

Deal comes as Singer gets serious about making the New Line-Legendary co-production “Jack the Giant Killer” his next directing effort, according to sources.

WB and Legendary Pictures have labored for months to pull together the rights to the film, which Singer will produce with Julie Yorn. Polly Johnsen, who was Polly Cohen when she was the WB exec who presided over the Singer-directed WB/Legendary collaboration “Superman Returns,” will also be a producer.

What catches me here isn’t the notion of remaking Excalibur so much as this: according to this, Warner Bros. has spent months and, by obvious extension, lots of money to acquire the remake rights to Excalibur. But Excalibur was based on material that has been in the public domain literally for centuries! This is what I don’t get. If Warner Bros. wanted to do a King Arthur movie, they could have simply hired a writer and said, “Write us a draft of a script based on the Arthurian legends.” But Hollywood suits don’t think like that, do they? They don’t think in terms of getting a project done, they think in terms of properties to be acquired. Which means that where they could make any movie they want based on Le Morte d’Arthur, they’d much rather spend orders of magnitude more money to acquire rights to a thirty-year old movie.

The mind reels.

(And really, why remake Excalibur anyway? The original is really about as good an Arthurian movie as I think can probably be made, given the non-cinematic nature of the source material. If the suits are that keen on hopping on the filmed-fantasy bandwagon, there are lots of unmade properties out there. This makes no sense.)

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Moving forward – the same direction as always.

I wrote once before on the initial graphic novel set in the Firefly universe, Those Left Behind. Now there are two such graphic novels; Those Left Behind has been joined by Better Days. While I’ll pretty much jump at nearly any chance to revisit this universe, neither of these two graphic novels is completely satisfying, which is oddly disappointing considering my belief that comics is the ideal medium for the Firefly universe to live on, if live on it does.

The problem with each one boils down simply to the fact that they are too short. It took me about twenty minutes to read each one; they’re just too slight. It’s really pretty frustrating; you would think that comics would give Joss Whedon room to breathe with his Firefly tales, but apparently these books are collections of miniseries that were mandated at just three issues apiece. The result are fun stories full of that Firefly flair that nevertheless flash by, without a real sense of the stories being fleshed out or with the subplots resolved too quickly or not given enough room to breathe.

Those Left Behind is apparently intended to lead right into the movie Serenity, and thus sets up things like Shepherd Book having left the ship when the movie starts and the two “Hands of Blue” pursuers of River Tam having been replaced by The Operative. Thus, parts of Those Left Behind probably won’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, or if they do make sense, they won’t realize how things are resolved at the end of the story.

Better Days tells a “standard” Firefly story; this could have been an episode of the show, really. The crew performs one of its less-than-legal jobs, but unlike most jobs Captain Reynolds and crew take on, this one results in a huge payday, resulting in the crew getting to indulge some fantasies as to what they would do if they had lots and lots and lots of money. (Jayne’s fantasy is a hoot, and River Tam’s is…well, you’ll have to read it yourself.) It’s a good story, but again, it contains one too many subplots for a story that is only being told in three issues. Also, since the page count is at a premium, the action sequences in these comics tend to be hard to follow. They almost seem like individual frames taken from filmed action sequences, and as such it’s often hard to understand who is doing what.

This is all a shame. I don’t know if Firefly has a future in comics or not; while I enjoyed these two books, I can’t think they really helped the cause at all. Three issues here, three issues there – that’s no way to sustain interest in the ‘Verse. Bummer.

(Apparently a third Firefly comic, one which fleshes out the background of Shepherd Book, is on the way at some point.)

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Something for Thursday

Emanuel Chabrier was a French composer at the end of the nineteenth century. He was active at the time when Debussy and Ravel were coming into their own, and Chabrier’s voice is a more minor one in the annals of French music, but he wrote vibrant music. His best known work is this musical tribute to the land to France’s south. Here’s Espana.

Pay close attention to the bassoons at the 1:31 mark — that’s got to be one of the best orchestral passages featuring the bassoons ever. Also of note is the big passage at the 3:35 mark, when Chabrier writes a sparkling passage in which it feels as though the sections of the orchestra are playing in two different time signatures.

I was fortunate enough to play this work in college. It’s one of the most infectious pieces I know — its rhythms, constantly dancelike and always just slightly off-kilter with the beat never quite where we expect it, are pure delight, and there are wonderful melodies at play here as well. I love this piece.

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But what about Brett Fah-vruh?

So, Brett Favre has made up his mind now. Really. He’s gonna play. His mind’s made up. He’s now a Minnesota Viking.

Well…maybe I get surprised, but I can’t see how this works out well at all for Minnesota. Favre has had one good season lately (the year before last), but despite his “Iron Man” tendency to not miss starts, his physical effectiveness has gone down steadily, year by year, until last year he managed to lead the NFL in interceptions thrown. Passing accuracy and arm troubles generally aren’t the kinds of problems that start to reverse themselves as quarterbacks with enormous amounts of mileage reach the age of 39 and their sixteenth or seventeenth season in the league. I’m thinking that a lot of eyes popped in the Midwest today, and the eyes that did the most popping were the defensive backs at Bears, Lions and Packers’ training camps. They’ve all got to be salivating at the prospect of watching Favre for another year as he runs around and lobs grapefruit-like passes out of his refusal to accept that he just can’t make the throws he could make ten years ago when he was already four years past his Super Bowl title.

What does Favre bring to the Vikings? At this point, I have no idea. Yes, he brings fierce competitiveness. But that’s about it, I think. He’s not a quarterback who is anywhere near the top of his game. He brings a larger-than-life persona that could well undermine the efforts of a relatively new coach. And he delays, by a year and maybe two, the Vikings’ development of whoever they think their quarterback of the future is going to be. By bringing him in, it’s clear that they’ve pretty much given up, rightly or wrongly, on Tarvaris Jackson. But with Favre there now, he takes up a valuable year or two while the Vikes have a pretty good defense in place and a hell of a running back. If Favre plays both the years on his contract, by the time he leaves the Vikings will again be in transition. As a “win now” type of move, signing Favre doesn’t seem like the best idea in the world.

The Vikings were 10-6 last year, while Favre’s Jets were 9-7. Now, I think that the Vikes are better than the Jets, so the question becomes: does Favre make the Vikings better? I’m just not sure that he does. Maybe one more win, for 11-5. I don’t think that Favre makes the Vikes a team that can really contend with the conference’s best teams (the Giants and Eagles). So: with Favre, I think the Vikings have put themselves in a tough spot. By going for the old veteran, they’ve committed themselves to a very narrow window of opportunity for winning, and they’ve done it with a guy who just doesn’t seem like much of a winner anymore. I don’t expect that this will backfire to the tune of a 4-12 season and the franchise in shambles, but I do think that this will translate to 10-6 for a couple of years and then some rebuilding once the current defense gets too old to be effective.

In short, while I’m not sure that Vikings fans will come to hate the Favre signing (it’ll never come close to replacing the Herschel Walker trade in the Vikings’ annals of poorly-considered personnel moves), I do think that in five years Vikes fans will look back on the Favre era much as Bills fans now look back on the Flutie era: a couple of pleasant and maddening years that didn’t amount to much.

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An odd observation….

I’m watching an old episode of The A-Team right now, and a character, referring to the episode’s villain, just said: “Yeah, he’s a real scuzz.”

Wow. I remember the noun “scuzz” and its adjective, “scuzzy”, from my youth. I haven’t heard the word “scuzz” in probably twenty-five years.

No, I have no point here.

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Lying Locke

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch was pretty strongly hyped when it came out a few years ago; I remember seeing it mentioned on nearly every SF and Fantasy site I tend to frequent. I made mental notes to read it, and then kept forgetting about it…and forgetting about it…and forgetting about it…until I finally picked up a copy when I remembered it one day whilst standing in Borders. I read it soon after, and it turns out there was a reason for all the hype: it’s a really good book, an adventure story that actually rollicks. I read a lot of adventure tales, and not all of them actually manage to rollick. This one? Yup, it’s set at full rollick.

Locke Lamora is a thief who lives in the city of Camorr, which is most reminiscent of Renaissance Venice, with its canals and its tightly-clustered buildings piled atop muddy islands. There are differences, though: the entire city is dominated by structures made of “Elderglass”, left behind by some non-human race thousands of years before; the skyline is dominated by five towers of Elderglass that rise over six hundred feet above the rest of Camorr. Alchemy is also practiced in Camorr, alchemy to produce light and to hinder one’s enemies and to turn regular animals into docile beasts of burden in a creepy process called “Gentling”. Locke Lamora is apprenticed to a guild of thieves, but that guild eventually kicks him out when he unleashes a scheme that ends up costing a couple of his fellow thieves their lives. He falls in with another group of thieves, though, and after he’s grown up with the rest of these thieves, he and his friends form their own little thieves’ guild, calling themselves “the Gentleman Bastards”. Their goal is to get rich by fleecing those already rich, and as the book opens, Locke Lamora is already laying the groundwork for just such a scheme, pretending to be a dealer in highly valuable brandy from a distant kingdom.

However, dark things are afoot in the arrival in Camorr of a mysterious figure called the Gray King. who has his sights set on taking over rule over the entire city’s criminal underworld from a man named Barsavi. The Gray King’s plans also involve Locke Lamora, for some reason, and Locke ends up in a great deal of trouble before the book is even half done.

It was an interesting choice, using the tropes of high fantasy to tell a caper story like this, and Lynch does it all very well. Sometimes the dialog is a bit hard to accept; I’m sure we’ve all read bad fantasies where the characters all talk as if they’ve just been transported from the pages of Sir Thomas Malory to whatever fantasy they’re in now. The Lies of Locke Lamora isn’t like that. The dialog is earthy, full of expletives, and occasionally – very occasionally – the stuff being said sounds as though it needs to be said with a thick Jersey accent. At times it was a bit jarring, but if you tire of Fat Fantasy novels where everybody talks like Gandalf the White (“Run, Shadowfax, and show us the meaning of haste!”), then you might find pleasure here. The book is a caper story; imagine Ocean’s Eleven or The Thomas Crown Affair set in a fantasy world. There are double crosses, secret identities, plots and plans within plans and plots, and at the center of it all are Locke Lamora and his best friend Jean Tannen, frequently charing into situations with no plan whatsoever.

One of an apparent six planned sequels has already come out: Red Seas Under Red Skies. In this book, Locke and Jean arrive at a different city, a wealthy sea town called Tal Verrar, where the world’s most exclusive gambling house, the Sinspire, resides. Their plan is to break into the Sinspire’s vault and steal its contents. Do they succeed? I’ll never tell – but their plans do go awry when they find themselves embroiled in all manner of other intrigues at the very political heart of Tal Verrar, a frustrating state of affairs for two men who just want to steal lots of money from the rich. The plot of Lies is twisty enough, but Red Seas is, if anything, even twistier: the plot seems to lurch about every ten or twenty pages, so that what starts off as a caper story becomes a political thriller and then, about halfway through, a nautical tale and a pirate story. The plots and double-crosses come fast and furious in Red Seas, right up the very last page, which leaves our heroes in a bit of trouble whose resolution in the third book (still forthcoming) will, I hope, be as fascinating and enjoyable as what has gone before. I can’t wait.

(Red Seas does not necessarily assume that the reader has already read Lies, but it does help. The book’s opening is probably much more effective if one knows something of the history of Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen.)

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Sentential Links #181

Warning: these are all political, except for the last one. I’m in one of those moods.

:: I’m sorry to have to say this, but I really hope the teabag woman who thinks this is a great system, loses her health insurance and has to go get her health care in an animal stall. If she’s lucky enough to even get that. If she believes charity health care in soaking wet tents once a year is a mark of a well functioning market, she is so stupid she deserves it.

I’m not sure anymore if some of these people are even human.

:: When Teabag Joe and Jane show up at a health care town hall, they garner sympathy because they look like a regular frustrated person. Whatever their message is, it gains credibility because they’re not a career politician, they’re wearing shoes that don’t match their pants, and they seem genuinely angry about something. And in a debate about our personal health, that goes a long way. And this makes me wonder – why has nobody in the vaunted Obama operation, nobody holding any of these town halls, tried to contextualize their positions by using actual real people who want or need universal health insurance? Michael Moore found a bunch of people – sympathetic people – and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but he’s fat. (Remember when Bill Clinton made the GOP look like a bunch of tools at the State of the Union by citing one of his invited guests, a guy who had aided the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and saved lives on that day, and then after the guy’s unanimous standing ovation, dropped the fact that the guy was now broke because he worked for the government and the GOP had just shut down the Federal government? Yeah, good times. I’ll never forget the look on Trent Lott’s face when he did that. Maybe Obama will figure this out eventually.)

:: There are only two outcomes here. Either we get very good at spotting and stopping these attempts at a brownshirt takeover the minute they crop up; or they’re going to get very good at public intimidation, and keep ratcheting it up further toward outright violence and goon rule. That’s how it’s going to be for the rest of this administration. The sooner we resign ourselves to the zero-sum nature of this fight, the sooner we can get on with getting good at it.

:: There’s a bizarre love triangle among the Republican party, the media, and the lunatic right-wing fringe, and it’s not going to end well for anyone involved. The Republican party is dooming itself to long-term irrelevance by alienating the young and non-white; they may even be setting themselves up for primary challenges from nutjobs. The media is losing what credibility it has by parroting teh crazy. And the lunatic right-wing fringe is headed for an inevitable series of “Sister Souljah” moments when Republicans wise up and realize they have to denounce the teabaggers.

:: Nixon, after becoming Ike’s vice president, said Republicans “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America” in the White House. Civil rights leaders were accused of being a Soviet plot. The Civil Rights Act was believed to be intended to “enslave” whites. A prominent right-wing radio host insisted that JFK was building a political prison in Alaska to detain critics of the administration. When FDR proposed Social Security, the conservatives of the era not only screamed about “socialism,” but told the public Roosevelt would force Americans to wear dog tags.

These were all fringe, radical arguments at the time, and were ignored as insane by responsible journalists. No one in America would turn on the evening news or pick up the morning paper and read about pathetic right-wing conspiracy theories. If Fox News existed at the time, Sean Hannity would be doing special reports on each of these unhinged ideas, and Americans would be told that they were worthy of discussion.

:: “Let me get this straight: they show up at public events, try to derail real discussion of the issues by being loud, belligerent assholes, and get on the news? Unbelievable. They stole my bit.” – Westboro Baptist Church minister and flamboyant gay activist Fred Phelps

“Jesus Christ, Mom. I’m like a year old and have downs syndrome and even I know that’s bullshit.” – Trig Palin

“Iz in ur Oh-Arr, yoothanizin ur gramma.” – Universal Health Kitteh

“They’re actually having a debate about this? What the fuck is wrong with them?“ – Pretty much every non-US citizen in the entire world

:: This was not a museum: it is a haunted house. It is a carnival ride. It shows throughout in the layout — the rubes are supposed to be shuttled through efficiently, get their little thrills, and exit so the next group can make the trip. If they’d had a few million more, I imagine they would have invested in tracks and little cars and turned it into the Creation Ride. The creators of this place wouldn’t recognize a museum if they woke up in the middle of the Smithsonian on a bed of museum maps with a giant sign saying “MUSEUM” in front of their faces and an army of docents shouting directions at them. They seem to have gotten all their information about how a museum works by visiting Disneyland. (There’s probably some kind of correlation between the state of the health care debate and the fact that the Creation “Museum” is doing bang-up business.)

:: Science fiction is eternal; it is the demigod cousin of literature itself, a cat with an infinite amount of extra lives. Long live science fiction. (Huzzah!)

All for this week.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound…but I didn’t see many of them, as I spent less time online this past week owing to a minor cold that inconvenienced me a bit. Oh well.

:: But here’s a site that aggregates Star Wars-related photographic oddity. This cracked me up:

As did this:

And how about “Silent Era Star Wars“:

And then there’s this:

ROWR!

:: On a non-Star Wars vein, here’s a ridiculously bad-ass looking hand tool. No, I won’t get one. The price tag is really steep and I’d really not have a use for it, but still — that’s hard core toolage!

More next week.

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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