Tag: Geek Stuff

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Tremble, mere mortals!

I’m writing this entry not from home, but from the wi-fi enabled cafe at another location of The Store. (My own Store does not currently have wi-fi, because the local telecom carriers don’t yet have a transmitter in close enough proximity to The Store for wi-fi to be possible.) I honestly don’t remember if I’ve ever posted to the blog from outside the friendly confines of Casa Jaquandor, so this may well be a first of epic proportions. I’m sitting here, drinking strawberry-infused iced tea, typing away as I generate the second draft of a short story I finished some time ago, and I’m happy as a clam.

(One day, someone’s going to have to do some actual scientific research as to the happiness of clams. How happy can they be, really?)

Oh, and I’ve got my cell phone on, too. In one fell swoop, I have planted my feet squarely in 2004! (I’m still lacking an iPod, obviously.)

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Here I go, again on my own….

Actually, I’m not sure what that post title has to do with anything, but it’s what leaped to mind, so there it is. Some notes:

:: Exactly fourteen years ago today, I turned twenty-two years old. Good times, those were! I remember it as though it was…fourteen years ago.

:: Happy Birthday George Gershwin, wherever you are! S’wonderful, s’marvelous, she should care for me….

:: Things may look a little weird around here for a while. I’ve exceeded the bandwidth limit on where I keep my graphics, and I don’t have time to try to fix it until later.

:: Only one guess thus far at last week’s Unidentified Earth, so apparently a hint is in order? Pictured therein is the only municipally operated one of these in the United States.

:: Here’s an article about the twenty greatest spaceship captains. It’s pretty good, up until the final five, when it gets the rankings horribly, awfully wrong.

:: EW, a magazine I wrote off years ago because I finally couldn’t take the insufferably smug tone of its critics, has a fairly non-smug selection of the Top ten episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They’re all superb episodes, and their Number One episode is also my Number One episode, which is nice. (Both these links from SFSignal.)

:: The women of SWILL have created a calendar which they are selling in order to raise money for Living Beyond Breast Cancer. Buy one here.

:: October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. More info here. Consider lighting a candle that night at 7:00 pm.

On a meta-blogging note, posting will be light for the next few days, and possibly even a week. The Wife starts a much-needed vacation tomorrow, and I’ll be taking a couple of days off from work in order to spend time with her and with The Daughter and do stuff that doesn’t involve a keyboard but may involve large amounts of Cool-whip. Behave, folks!

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Ahhh, the memories of Marvel Team-Up!

Michael May’s Adventureblog provides this fun meme-thing:

First, select ten fictional characters (from any medium) by whichever method you like best.

1. Diarmuid dan Ailell (from The Fionavar Tapestry)
2. Obi-Wan Kenobi
3. James Bond (the Lazenby, Dalton, or Daniel Craig incarnations)
4. Wonder Woman
5. Captain Malcolm Reynolds
6. Jehane bet Ishak (from The Lions of Al-Rassan)
7. Agent Dana Scully
8. Hermione Grainger
9. Lady Eowyn (from The Lord of the Rings)
10. Han Solo

Divide the list up by even and odd.

OK. Team One: Diarmuid Dan Ailell, James Bond, Mal Reynolds, Agent Scully, Lady Eowyn.

Team Two: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Wonder Woman, Jehane bet Ishak, Hermione Grainger, Han Solo.

Which group of five would make a better Five Man Band (like a Power Rangers team)? Who would you slot in each position: Leader, Lancer (second-in-command), Big Guy, Smart Guy, The Chick?

Hmmmm! I’m guessing Team Two.

Leader: Obi Wan Kenobi
Lancer: Wonder Woman
Big Guy: Han Solo
Smart Guy (girl, in this case): Hermione Grainger
The Chick: Jehane bet Ishak

Just for the sake of completeness, here’s how Team One would break out:

Leader: Mal Reynolds
Lancer: James Bond
Big Guy: Diarmuid Dan Ailell
Smart Guy (also a woman in this case): Agent Scully
The Chick: Lady Eowyn.

The roles in Team One would be a lot more fluid, I suspect; while Diarmuid is often portrayed as a fun-loving rogue, whenever the chips are down in those books, the guy rises to the occasion and provides some serious leadership. Bond also tends to be a loner a lot of the time, so he’d probably switch in and out of the lancer role, maybe even taking three roles at times (Big Guy and Smart Guy). Lady Eowyn’s also got some strength and leadership skills, and of course Agent Scully is no pushover either. Team Chemistry would be a problem here, I think; a lot of strong-willed people would end up butting heads.

If you think the team would be improved by swapping one character between the even and odd groups, which ones would you switch?

I don’t think I’d switch anyone. Team Two seems pretty strong, in my mind, and any trade into Team One wouldn’t reduce the problems noted above. So no trades; these are the teams.

Gender-swap 2, 8 & 10. Which character would have the most change in their story arc? Which the least? Would any of these characters have to have a complete personality change to be believable as the opposite sex?

OK: Obi Wan Kenobi becomes a woman, Hermione Grainger becomes a man, and Han Solo becomes a woman. Hmmmmm.

I suspect that Obi Wan could have been made a woman with almost no trouble at all. Hermione probably wouldn’t have been believable in the slightest as a boy/man; since the whole dynamic of the Potterverse is set by the trio of heroes being two boys and a girl, I don’t think three boys would work at all, so there would have to be a girl, which in turn would lead to Ron being a woman. Or something like that.

And Han Solo as a woman? That would make his (her) relationship with Leia fairly interesting, would it not? However, aside from that love triangle, I’m not sure this would really impact the story in a very large way. Nothing in Star Wars makes a female analogue of Han Solo unthinkable.

Compare the matchups of 1 & 8 and 5 & 9. (Ignore canon sexual preferences for the moment.) Which couple would be more compatible?

1 and 8: Diarmuid dan Ailell and Hermione Grainger? The Hermione of the actual Potter books wouldn’t even be a blip on Diarmuid’s radar, since he’s a fairly sexual adult and she’s just a kid, finding her way. Now, an adult Hermione might well catch his eye, as he is clearly attracted to strong-willed, brave, and intelligent women.

5 and 9: Captain Mal Reynolds and Lady Eowyn? Eowyn’s all about duty and her country, while Mal’s all about freedom. I can’t see them being compatible at all.

Which couple would be more plausible to people from either principal’s home culture?

Definitely Diarmuid/Hermione. They both come from worlds of magic and myth. A space traveler in Edoras? Not happening. On a genre mash-up basis, that couple’s a total non-starter.

Your team is 3, 4 & 9. The mission consists of a social challenge, a mental challenge and a physical challenge. Which team member do you assign to each challenge?

Bond, Wonder Woman, and Lady Eowyn. Well, obviously Wonder Woman gets the physical challenge, just because she’s got some super strength. (Which isn’t to say that’s the only kind of task she’d be good for. We’re limiting to just the focus of this question.)

Bond would get the mental challenge, I think. In the best of all Bond stories, he has to do a lot of figuring stuff out.

Which leaves the “social challenge” to Lady Eowyn. Now, I’m not entirely sure what a “social challenge” actually is, but her role in the books is at least partially social, a leadership role, so that’s what she would get here. I think.

7 becomes 1’s boss for a week in some plausible fashion. How’s their working relationship?

Agent Scully as Diarmuid dan Ailell’s boss? That’s an odd picture, I must say! Scully would find their working relationship frustrating, I suspect, although his sardonic nature might well mirror her partner Agent Mulder’s, albeit with more overt humor and wit. For his part, Diarmuid would do what he’s told, since underneath his sardonic exterior beats the heart of a man who takes duty very seriously. In fact, not only would Diar do his duty, but he’d have killed anyone who refused or balked at doing theirs!

2 finds him/her/itself inserted into 6’s continuity. As far as anyone other than 2 or 6 is concerned, they’ve always been there. What role would 2 be presumed to have had in 6’s story, and could they fit in without going wonky?

So we’d have Obi Wan Kenobi in The Lions of Al-Rassan? Well, if he actually had a lightsaber, he’d stand out like Manute Bol in the land of the Munchkins. However, there is certainly room in that mythos for a band of monastic knights a la the Jedi — especially if we expand Jehane’s “continuity” to include the other novels set in that same physical world, The Sarantine Mosaic and The Last Light of the Sun.

3 and 5 get three wishes. The catch is that they have to agree on all three wishes before they get the benefits of any of them. What three wishes would they make?

James Bond and Mal Reynolds? Agreeing on wishes? Again, this one’s tough because of the genre mashup — spy thriller meets space opera/western. So what would they wish for together? Crikey, that’s hard. Personally, I’d expect that they’d sit down and play three games of cards, one wish going to the winner of each game.

1 and 2 are brainwashed by a one-time artifact that works even on people immune to mind control to attack and kill 4. They keep their normal personality, skills and competence level, except any Code vs. Killing has been turned off. Can 4 survive? How?

Diarmuid and Obi Wan have to go after Wonder Woman. If they could somehow part her from her Lasso of Truth, they just might be able to pull it off. Diarmuid would have to accept this as a suicide mission, and Obi Wan’s powers would be severely tested. However, if Wonder Woman has the Lasso with her, Diar and Obi Wan are screwed. If she ropes them with the Lasso of Truth, that might cause the effect of the brainwashing to wear off!

6, 7, 9 & 10 must help an orphanage full of small and depressed children have a merry Christmas. Who does what, knowing that at the very least the kids will be expecting a visit from Santa?

Jehane, Agent Scully, Lady Eowyn, and Han Solo? I guess the ladies would do the shopping and set-up, and then they’d force Han to put on the Santa costume.

3 and 8 are challenged to circumnavigate the Earth in eighty days or less, using only forms of transportation invented before 1900. Can they do it, or will they be fatally distracted by sidequests or their own personality conflicts?

James Bond and Hermione Grainger? Yeah, they’d probably do it; I’m sure Hermione’s read books on the operation of hot-air balloons and sailing vessels, and James Bond can operate any vehicle at all. As for personality conflicts, I suspect they’d get along fine, unless again we’re talking about adult Hermione, who might then find herself in bed with Mr. Bond.

And I guess that’s it! Fun quiz. No tagging.

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Useless Factoidia

A bunch o’ stuff!

:: Several people have indicated that they were highly amused by the bunny with the pancake on its head. That’s great! But there turns out to be a backstory here: the bunny (now sadly deceased) was named Oolong, and had the ability to balance stuff on its head, an ability which was “exploited” by Oolong’s owner for Internet photos. The stuff you learn!

:: Reader Charlie (who hails from Iowa City!) directs my attention to this set of 2007 NFL predictions, which equates each team with a Star Wars character. This is pretty funny stuff…although Norwood’s miss was almost 17 years ago! Can’t we move past that as the defining moment for this franchise?

:: I don’t know about this possible approach to Star Trek that may be in the offing in the movie JJ Abrams is making. Basically the idea is that old Trek standby, the “bad guys go back in time to alter history so our heroes never existed” plot or something like that — but the plot succeeds in some fashion, meaning that instead of telling a story set within established Trek canon but in the days of James T. Kirk’s years at Starfleet Academy, Abrams is literally re-setting the timeline to zero. It’s an interesting approach, but I like established Trek canon, and I’ve never much enjoyed JJ Abrams’s work, so we’ll see.

:: I’ve had some search hits the last day or two for JP Losman on the Jim Rome Show; I assume they’re looking for this interview Rome did. We’ll see how he does on the field, but as far as talking to media goes, Losman’s come a long way. I really hope he succeeds as the quarterback here, because Losman’s just one of the most likable guys to come to Buffalo in a long time. He just seems like a good guy, and I hope his career reflects that.

:: For some reason I’m also getting lots of search engine hits for “What was the Millennium Falcon in when it lost its topside radar dish”, or some variant wording thereof. The answer is, of course, the superstructure of the Death Star II.

:: I sympathize with a guy who got sick, certainly, but I’m flummoxed as to how anyone could consume multiple bags of microwave popcorn on a daily basis for over a decade. I adore popcorn, and I don’t even eat it every week, much less every day. Wow.

:: Matthew Yglesias has a good, and brief, post about Sen. Larry Craig. I agree with pretty much every word.

:: A couple of weeks ago, Jayme e-mailed me about For Better or For Worse, when the strip was in the middle of a week-long thing where all that happened was Liz going on in very long-winded fashion to her friend Candice about how Anthony’s life has been a disaster and how he ended up in a terribly unhappy marriage and how now he’s free and he’s the love of her life and all that jazz. As Jayme wrote:

Seems to me that Lynn Johnson is going out of her way to justify the storyline’s direction, and writing almost a point-by-point rebuttal of bloggers’ gripes in the process.

Well, Comics Curmudgeon is on the case, finding an interesting parallel between recent “present day” events in FOOB and the past events that the strip is now depicting in some kind of weird flashback mode.

Personally, I find that reading Michael’s narration makes me hear the voice of Bob Saget in my head, and that’s never a good thing.

:: Here’s a fine essay on how we’ve lost “silence”:

Just give me five minutes without it; that’s all I ask, perhaps all I’ll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor’s home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical “negative space.” Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.

(via)

:: I think that now I know where Linus will be hanging out this Halloween. He’s looking, after all, for the most sincere of all pumpkin patches!

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Things that make my eyes glaze over, part 857

At least three times in the last day I’ve followed links from various blogs or other sites to different sites that complain about scientifically impossible stuff in science fiction movies, which invariably leads to kvetching about that old chestnut, “You can’t hear explosions in space!”

Well, duh. I also can’t hear the London Symphony Orchestra in space, but nobody’s bitching about Star Wars on that basis.

So I, for one, will keep hearing explosions in my space movies, OK?

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The Geek Manifesto

Mr. Bennion has a nifty manifesto, “What a Geek Believes”, that he knicked from here. I’ll reproduce it below, with the things I believe allowed to stand but with the things I do not believe struck out.

(The original is in one long paragraph, but I’m going to break it out into a list format for my purposes here.)

I believe that Han shot first. (OK, I’d prefer it if Han shot first, but I’ve never been able to get really worked up about this.)

I believe that Ally Sheedy was hotter before Molly Ringwald cleaned her up. (No, I liked her better after. But I always thought she should have ended up with Brian, not “Sport-o”.)

I believe in miniatures, models, claymation, and not revealing the shark until you absolutely have to. (Well, yeah, but I’ve never felt the antipathy toward CGI that many geeks do.)

I believe that George Lucas, for better or for worse, change[d] the way we see the world, each other, and ourselves.

And I believe that we will someday reach those stars that he himself made visible.

I believe that George Lucas is also a narrow-minded, money-grubbing, pig-headed slave to the now, who ought to be locked away from his own creations, lest he do them further harm. (“Money-grubbing”? Why does Lucas always get singled out for doing things that everybody else in the business does? And I have no problem with what he’s done lately, as I’ve demonstrated repeatedly.)

I believe that Jean-Luc Picard is the better Starship Captain, but I also believe that James Tiberius Kirk is infinitely cooler. (Kirk’s my favorite Captain. But I love Picard, too — different kinds of guys.)

I believe that a child standing in line to buy a book at midnight is fantastic; I believe that reading makes you smart — it’s schools that make you dumb. (Reading what? What is it about “schools” that make you dumb? This is too generic a statement.)

I believe that any episode of Futurama is better than any program featuring a precocious teenager who’s wise beyond their years. (I’m having trouble thinking up a counterexample, but there’s always a counterexample.)

I also believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be the sole exception that proves this rule. (I never got into Buffy, but I liked it just fine when I watched a stray episode or two. I just never wanted to invest myself in getting into it; besides, I recall something else being on in the same timeslot.)

I believe that comic books are an art form, and will someday be recognized as such.

I believe that good shows die too young; and crap shows last too long. (Well, I’m not sure. What I really wish is that American teevee would go the anime route, and put together shows that tell a single story and then go away. The open-ended thing gets problematic, as good hit shows go on past the time when they really should go away (X-Files, ER). Sure, Firefly and Once and Again and My So-Called Life ended too soon, but I’d rather have what we do of those shows than have them spread out over three or four brilliant seasons and then three or four more less-brilliant ones.)

I believe that Eddie Izzard is the funniest man alive, and I don’t care whether you’ve ever heard of him or not — it’s still true. (I am totally unfamiliar with Eddie Izzard, so I’m agnostic on this point.)

I believe that a girl who likes movies about zombies is hotter than whoever is on the cover of Maxim this month.

I believe that Belloch ate that fly. (I’d agree, except that it’s “Belloq”, not “Belloch”.)

I swear to God that I heard Luke call Leia “Carrie.” (To my dying day I will not hear this as “Carrie!”. It always sounds in my ears like something along this lines of “Heyeah!”)

I believe that Samwise Gamgee never quite got the credit he really deserved. (In what way? I don’t think that Samwise Gamgee ever wanted credit. He didn’t want to be a Ringbearer, and he didn’t want to go to Mordor. What he wanted was to see the Elves, and then go home and marry the girl with ribbons in her hair, which he did. The only credit he ever seems to want is for his name to be mentioned in the tales of his age, which it certainly is.)

I believe in magic, I believe in dreams, I believe in the power of music, movies, and the untold worlds inside an everyday library card. And I do not believe that geeks will inherit the earth; I believe that we already have. (Well, that should be on my tombstone.)

And there you are.

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I’m so pleased you’re not dead!

I have to admit that my geek heart goes a little pitter-pat every time I read something about Indiana Jones and the Journey Back to the Well One Last Time. This time I learn that Karen Allen, who played Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark, is back on board. And what’s more, it appears that since 1981 she has aged about six years:

I’m still skeptical about this movie, but we’ll see.

As long as I’m on the subject of Dr. Jones, I may as well run down my thoughts on the original three movies:

:: Raiders of the Lost Ark is, of course, a great movie. When I saw it in 1981 it pretty much took my breath away, being the first cinematic adventure of its type I had ever seen. (Within a year I would discover Errol Flynn. What a great time that was to be a ten-year-old geek!) My father, who attended the movie with us knowing nothing about it at all, was appalled at the violence, especially at the very end, but I thought it was just the coolest thing. The movie was rollicking fun, it contained exactly enough romance to convince a ten-year-old that seducing lovely women is what adventurer-archaeologists do and not one minute more, it had surprises, it had exotic stuff, it had John Williams at the height of his powers. How good was Raiders, in my eyes? Well, for one summer it got me to stop wondering if Han Solo would survive carbon-freeze.

I remember seeing it several times in 1981. The first movie we rented when we got a VCR was Raiders, naturally enough. It was when we rented it that I first saw the reflected cobra in the glass pane in the Well of Souls. Strangely, it took me until the late 1990s before I worked out the math of how high the Staff of Ra is and compared it to the scene in the Map Room, which would have to imply that Indiana Jones is four feet tall. I don’t remember when I noticed the fly crawling into Belloq’s mouth, but I think that was pretty early on. (And I’ve always wished that the film would have explained better just how Indy knew not to look on the power of the Ark.)

:: I was in seventh grade when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came along. I loved it too at first, but then I decided at some point that I hated it — Willie Scott’s whining got to me, I guess, as did the bit where they jump out of an airplane with only an inflatable rubber raft to break their fall. However, I gradually came to like it again when I watched it in college. It has a very different flavor than Raiders, which I appreciated; I liked its much darker tone and its foray into Eastern mysticism. I actually like the Short Round character, particularly the scene where he awakens Indy from the “Fever of Kali” (or whatever it was called). If anything, I now feel that Temple of Doom is underrated. (And another cracker of a John Williams score — his “Parade of the Slave Children” theme is one of his very best.)

:: I also loved Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when it first came out, and I came to like it a bit less over time. With this one, however, my opinion of it hasn’t really rebounded. It’s still a lot of fun and compulsively watchable, but it suffers a lot on several key grounds. Yes, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery have great chemistry, but the whole bit about how they both slept with Elsa the Nazi Archaeologist is just creepy and doesn’t really add anything to the plot. The plot itself is basically a massive retread of Raiders. (Don’t believe me? Which film am I describing here: “An old authority figure from Indy’s past turns out to have been very near to discovering the last resting place of one of Christendom’s most famed and legendary artefacts, and Indy is off to pick up the trail where this old authority figure left off. Along the way Indy enlists the aid of his friend Sallah, where he eventually ends up in the Middle East racing the Nazis to finding the artefact, at one point engaging a thrilling chase with an entire convoy of Nazi vehicles. In the end, the villains are undone because they’ve failed to understand something about the power of the Christian artefact that Indy has already figured out.”)

Sallah is turned into something of a buffoon, and Marcus Brody — whom Raiders implied to be Indy in later, civilian life — is reduced to near Jar Jar Binksian status. (The scene where the Nazis manage to capture Brody is just painful to watch.) Last Crusade is the most directly cartoonish of the Indiana Jones movies. And at the leap of faith toward the end, when Indy takes the step and plants his foot down on thin air, he looks astonished that it’s worked. Shouldn’t that look of astonishment therefore represent that he didn’t have faith at all, and thus he should be plunged to his doom?

Anyway, I hope this new movie is good. I really do.

(Photo of Karen Allen via)

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Spiderpig, spiderpig!

Yup, I saw The Simpsons Movie the other night. A great time was had by all. Well, by me and the three guys I went with. The rest of the theater? Don’t much care if they had a great time. Jerks. (Especially the idiots who can’t seem to go ten minutes without sending a f***ing text message, whether there’s a movie on or not. Sure, texting is less pernicious than, say, actually talking on the phone or getting up from the middle of a row of theater seats to go outside and answer the call, but it’s still a darkened theater, and the sudden blue-white glow of a cell phone being opened so someone can text back to some idiot friend of theirs is really distracting.)

Anyhow, I found the movie very funny, although not quite “Marge versus the Monorail” funny, or “Stonecutters” funny, or “Twenty-two Short Films About Springfield” funny, or “Bart’s Comet” funny, or “King-Size Homer” funny, or “Cape Feare” funny, or…well, you get the idea. But it’s very funny indeed. It’s got all the hallmarks of good Simpsons humor: subversive stuff that skewers, well, everything; entire subplots that turn out to be mere set-up for something completely different later; Homer exhibiting cluelessness on a scale unimagined before; perfectly-placed one-liners from Ned Flanders and Ralph Wiggum.

Nearly every negative review I’ve read of this movie basically boils down to a laundry list of favorite characters who don’t get enough screentime, which is frankly unavoidable, given the sheer numbers of memorable people in Springfield. I think that some people expected the movie to be about Springfield, rather than about the Simpsons, but like any Simpsons fan, I wish more had been seen of a number of folks: Mr. Burns, Smithers, Apu, Principal Skinner, Superintendent Chalmers, Patty and Selma, and so on. And I think it would have been great if the movie had been dedicated to the memory of Troy McClure — they could have even had a screen credit reading, “To the memory of Troy McClure, whom you may remember from such films as…” and then list them.

A film music geek moment: The music by Hans Zimmer was actually decent, although when the end credits roll got to the music credits, there were so many names listed as assisting with the music, orchestrating it, and conducting it (how does the score for a movie that’s not even ninety minutes long require two conductors?!), that as always, I end up wondering just what it is that Hans Zimmer actually does when he’s “composing”. I can never make up my mind about Zimmer: more often than not I end up liking the resulting product just fine, but his “composition by committee” thing rubs me wrong somehow. I also wish that somehow they could have had an Alf Clausen musical number in there, although I did love how the throwaway “Spiderpig!” ditty improvised by Homer ends up actually playing a funny role later on. (And make sure you stick around through the credits, so that you can hear the “Springfield Anthem”.)

So yeah, I liked the movie. It was a lot of fun, which is exactly what it should have been.

By the way, I went to simpsonsmovie.com and made my own avatar:

(No, there’s no option for overalls there that I could find, so it’s blue pants. And no, I don’t own shoes in that color. But I would, because they’re pretty and I’m all about the pretty.)

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