Tag: Geek Stuff

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Snapshots from Ithaca

This weekend The Wife and I made our annual getaway to the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival, and we had a great time as always…although the festival itself wasn’t quite like it usually is, owing to the fact that Ithaca is in the midst of tearing apart its pedestrian mall to rebuild it (in truth, the infrastructure there was looking a bit long in the tooth, and I look forward to seeing what things look like when it’s done). I know that pedestrian malls aren’t thought of very highly anymore, but Ithaca is a small enough city that they are able to pull it off — it’s all of three blocks, and there’s plenty of parking and lots of nice businesses to frequent.

Anyway, it all started with a trip to a knitting supply store just outside of town, which is one of the nicer yarn shops we’ve found in our travels of such. The Wife ended up with a small pile of yarn to add to her stash:

The Wife's yarn haul. Wow!

Then we were off to downtown, where our first order of business was lunch at Waffle Frolic, a restaurant that we absolutely adore. This is their counter.

Ordering counter at WaffleFrolic #Ithaca

Since The Wife went on a gluten-free diet last year, we were thrilled to discover that Waffle Frolic has GF waffles. Even better, though, was that we learned that they also have GF fried chicken, so that we were both able to have waffles and fried chicken, which is one of the finest of all food combos. I never heard of it before a few years ago, but I am seriously in the tank for waffles and fried chicken, folks!

Waffles and fried chicken! #Yum

Next was some shopping and milling about. As I said, the Festival usually takes up the entire pedestrian mall, but this time it was sequestered mostly to either end of the mall, so there was more walking than usual, which was fine. There’s food and lots of crafts, with a great deal of stuff available that is made by local or regional artisans. I am increasingly a fan of buying things that are locally made, and if I can buy it directly from the person who made it, then that’s fantastic.

Now this was funny. There’s a comics store there that I usually go into, more to find something to bring back for The Daughter than for myself (I love comics, but I find that they tend to be wildly overpriced, which is why I tend to exclusively rely on the library for comics reading). Looking through the wares, I found a case with some toys and action figures and the like inside, and on top was this giant model of the starship Enterprise, in my favorite design that ship has ever sported:

Amazing model of the Enterprise at a comics shop in #Ithaca. The shopkeep proceeded to give me a mild tongue-lashing for taking the photo, because of technology and omnipresent access to photography and the like. Wasn't sure I understood his point, but I

As soon as I took the photo, though, the owner was right there to give me a tongue-lashing for taking photos in his shop. He went on some rant about the need to control or limit the technology, now that everyone has access to photography. I honestly did not understand the point he was making — is he worried about people using iPhone cameras to scan comics pages in his store so that they don’t have to buy the comics? It’s not like any of the stuff in there is his intellectual property, and besides, many times I’ve chosen to go into a business or store because someone posted a picture from within and said, “Check out the cool stuff this store has!” Weird. He also pointed to the “No photographs!” sign that maybe I should have seen…but the sign is above the door in the back of the store that leads to their back room, it’s about the size of an index card, and it’s taped to a wall that is also covered with all manner of comics-related posters and artwork. I offered to delete the photo, but he said that wasn’t necessary. I bought a little TARDIS for The Daughter — it has a little light on top — but I think I’ll be foregoing that shop in future trips to Ithaca. If he doesn’t want word getting out that he has cool shit in his store, then I’m happy to oblige.

Nice model, though.

On a happier note, the lack of pedestrian traffic in usual areas meant that I got to actually get up close to one of the Sagan Planet Walk markers! This is a public art installation in Ithaca, honoring the memory of Carl Sagan (one of my eternal heroes), in which stone markers are placed throughout the town in such a way as to constitute a walking tour of the Solar System, with the distances between the markers proportionally accurate to the distances between the planetary orbits. According to the website for the Planet Walk (associated with the Ithaca Sciencenter), the markers for the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are in temporary storage (with temporary signage indicating their location, so that the Planet Walk is still possible). But I got to pose with Jupiter. Yay, Jupiter!

Posing with Jupiter in Ithaca! (Wow, the camera did weird things with the stripes of my overalls.)

Finally, I visited my favorite used bookstore, Autumn Leaves. I only bought a couple of books this time — I’m trying to cut down my book acquisition until such time as we acquire more space for book storage, which will involve moving — but I always love going in that store. It’s bright and open and airy and inviting. And in their storefront window, they had a mannequin, attired thusly:

Mannequin at Autumn Leaves Used Books in Ithaca. I think they knew I was coming. #overalls #mannequin #Ithaca

It’s like they knew I was coming!

All in all, a lovely trip, and I’m sad it’s over. There are two places I’d like to live on this world, other than right here. One is Toronto. The other is Ithaca!

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On Death and Villainy

John Seavey, one of the regular posters at MightyGodKing, writes at length about Norman Osborn, the human alter-ego of Spider-Man villain Green Goblin. I don’t much have a dog in that fight, but I did like two different side points Seavey made along the way.

First:

I have gone on record multiple times as saying that if contrived resurrections cheapen deaths, the answer is to stop killing off characters so frequently and not to have fewer resurrections. Killing off a character in a shared universe is generally an act of colossal arrogance and short-sightedness, a statement along the lines of, “Well, I can’t think of anything more to do with this character, and I’m the Most Creative Person of All Time! The only interesting thing left to do is kill them off.” It’s never true. There are always more interesting stories to be told with a living character than a dead one, and that’s what makes resurrections so inevitable no matter how contrived they wind up being. The blame should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the killing writer, not the resurrecting one.

I think death is kind of overrated as a narrative device. It’s kind of cheap, really, an easy way of amping up the stakes — just kill someone off, to show that everything is real, that we’re playing for keeps. I find that a lot of deaths in stories feel like they’re there more for narrative effect than for any other reason, and a lot of them end up ringing false when it’s obvious they’re supposed to be incredibly shocking.

Good examples of this can be found all over the place: A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance. (Game of Thrones, for you who know it by the teevee.) George RR Martin gets heaped with praise all the time for being willing to sacrifice main characters, but I’d posit that by the point we’ve now reached, it’s clear that he’s not sacrificing main characters at all; he’s just disposing of secondary characters at surprising junctures.

More oddly, though, is the odd notion that a character should develop only so much, and then they should die. This strikes me as deeply silly, and the two best examples I know are characters who didn’t die: Han Solo, and Martin Riggs (of the Lethal Weapon movies). Harrison Ford has gone on record in the past as believing that Han should have died in Return of the Jedi, because he’d reached the end of his narrative and because it would have given the story a lot more gravitas. And Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black apparently left the series after his intention to kill off Martin Riggs at the end of Lethal Weapon 2 — pretty much for the same reasons — was shot down by the producers.

The problem here is, our lives don’t end when we reach handy points in our development as human beings. Well, for some of us they do, but that’s just the accident of timing, not some existential thing about the Universe dispensing with us upon our reaching of our inner Zen. It’s a silly reason to kill off a character, and Seavey is one hundred percent correct: a character doesn’t run out of potential stories just because one particular writer does.

And besides, “Death as route to gravitas” is…well, it’s just plain overrated anyway. How many major, named characters among the protagonists die over the course of The Lord of the Rings? Two: Boromir and Theoden. That’s it. And yet nowhere in that entire story would I ever claim that the stakes don’t feel pretty damned high, nor that a price will have to be paid for victory.

(For the record: Yes, I do think that Joss Whedon overdoes death as well, but his deaths tend to be a lot more visceral, given his skills at getting me to care about his characters in the first place.)

And second:

(W)hen you go back and read the original Green Goblin stories, he wasn’t much of a villain. He was a C-list Kingpin wannabe who failed at everything he tried, lost pretty much every fight he was in, and whose only talent was in running away. He didn’t even really have a backstory, because Stan Lee and Steve Ditko couldn’t decide who he was going to be under the mask. (Ditko wanted it to be a totally unmemorable nobody, to show that villains didn’t always have to be someone important to the hero. Lee felt like they’d spent so long building up the mystery of the Goblin’s identity that the audience would be upset if it wasn’t someone they recognized. The dispute was one of the reasons that Ditko left the title.) Basically, the Green Goblin was by no means the most important of Spider-Man’s bad guys.

Now, I’m not sure about this, and a couple commenters in the thread over there take issue with Seavey’s description of Ditko’s views and departure from the series. But Ditko’s point here, even if it wasn’t really Ditko’s point, is a good one, an interesting one.

There was a very effective episode of Magnum, PI that did this to really extraordinary effect — so much so that it’s one of my favorite episodes of that series. Magnum receives a strange telephone call from a cackling guy who promises to kill and leaves Magnum bits of nursery rhymes as clues. This pattern repeats several times, and it becomes very clear that this killer knows Magnum well and has a very specific beef with him. It’s a very well-made episode — Magnum occasionally eschewed its Rockford Files-esque tone for a kind of “Hawaii Noir” mode, usually to very good effect — but what makes it stand out is the resolution. Eventually the killer stands before Magnum, unmasked and grinning and waiting for his sick payoff…and Magnum doesn’t recognize him. Even later, after the killer has been dealt with and the whole mess is over, Magnum doesn’t remember him at all. He has to go back into his own personal records to figure out who this guy is, and it turns out that Magnum investigate the guy’s wife some years back in a possible divorce case, but the case turned up nothing at all and Magnum didn’t even take the guy’s money. I don’t recall what caused the guy to spiral into insane killing, and there’s a good chance that the episode doesn’t even fill in that detail, leaving it a complete mystery. But that’s one of the things that makes it really memorable: that the villain isn’t some significant figure from Thomas Magnum’s past; it’s just some guy with whom he had a completely mundane association for a short time years before, so mundane that he doesn’t even remember him.

Of course, I can turn this back to Star Wars. One thing that really incensed fans as the Prequel Trilogy unfolded was the idea that at the very heart of the mystery that is Darth Vader is a pathetic teenager, a guy who couldn’t get over the loss of his schoolboy crush.

It’s a hard thing, explaining villainy. Sometimes no explanation whatsoever is the most disturbing way to go.

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Geekapocalypse Soon!

It occurs to me that this fall is going to be a mite busy.

The new Thor movie comes out in November.

The second Hobbit movie comes out in December.

Season three of Sherlock comes along in October. (It’s not set to air in the US until 2014, from what I’m reading, but that won’t stop me.)

Scott Lynch’s long-awaited third novel in the Gentleman Bastard sequence, The Republic of Thieves, arrives in October.

JW Rinzler’s The Making of Return of the Jedi also hits shelves in October.

Along with all this is the usual season returns of teevee shows I already watch.

Oh, and our annual fall getaway, which will be the first weekend in October.

And NaNoWriMo in November.

And in December, I should be able to start the editing of Princesses In Space II: The Fall of the Planet Reichenbach (not the actual title).

I guess I’d better enjoy the next 2.5 months, because I suspect that starting mid-September, things are gonna roll!

UPDATE: My friend and former college roommate and best man at my wedding, Mr. Chris Gustafson, points out that the title of this post should be Ageekalypse, and not that abomination that I actually used in my pre-coffee stupor. Ach!

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This means something. This is important.

So The Wife and I took a few hours a couple weeks back to wander the aisles and corridors and back corners and nooks and crannies (but, sadly, no dimly-lit basement!) of the Orchard Park Antique Mall. This wonderful space, of which I’ve written before, is an old supermarket that was converted to an antique mall when the supermarket built itself a spiffy new location a mile down the road. It’s always a great place to kill some time, as I always find something cool there, whether it’s something I want to own or something I want to look at. Take, for example, this glowing art deco airplane lamp:

Or the Space Needle cigarette lighter (which is about eight inches tall):

Or the creepiest damned lamps you will ever see, ever, for the rest of your life.

I almost always find something to buy, however. On this trip I snagged a really lovely set of sushi dishes (photos forthcoming, I haven’t taken them yet), and, from one of the Used Book cabinets, this bit of movie memorabilia:

CE3K

If it looks like a plain stiff paper folder, of the kind you used to use in school to keep your class papers in a semi-organized state, it is. But what’s neat is that inside the folder are the real goods. See, this is an actual Official Press Kit, issued by Columbia Pictures, for the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition. Inside the folder are a number of items: a synopsis of the movie, a bio of Steven Spielberg (to that point in his life, obviously), and a complete roster of the film’s cast and crew. All these are typewritten on regular paper.

In addition to that, there’s a brown paper envelope that contains about a dozen black-and-white production still from the film.

CE3K II

Note the Columbia address down in the lower right corner.

I have absolutely no idea on the sequence of events that led to this thing sitting in a cabinet of an antique emporium in Orchard Park, NY, but I’ve got it now. Huzzah!

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A Nomination for the Role of Twelfth Doctor.

As soon as I heard the news that Matt Smith is stepping down as The Doctor (on Doctor Who, you buncha non-geeks), I, like everyone else, started thinking about who should be the next Doctor. My first thought was Chiwetel Ejiofor, best known as Peter in Love Actually and the Operative in Serenity.

But I have now changed my mind, because it occurs to me that the Doctor is always shown as a fairly tall fellow.

And to that, I say, bollocks.

Is there a height requirement to being a Timelord that I don’t know about? Because if not…it’s time for a short Doctor!

Really short!

So, for the role of the Twelfth Doctor, I hereby nominate:

Warwick Davis!

And you know what? I am pretty damned serious, the more I think about it.

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Is Gonzaga Porkins, then?

March Madness explained by invoking Star Wars:


Of course, the fact that a geek like this has to ask why Luke has a grenade on Hoth with which he blows up an Imperial Walker is disappointing. Come on, pay at least some attention to the movie.

(via)

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On fandom and groups and such

Lynn is nonplussed by the existence of Bronies:

I cannot understand adult My Little Pony fandom, especially adult male Pony fandom, known as “bronies”. I can sort of understand adult female Pony fandom but guys being interested in the activities of cute, pastel colored ponies… well, frankly, it’s just a wee bit creepy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You can be as creepy as you want as long as you’re not hurting anyone. Viva la diversity!

But I suppose I’m stuck on the old-fashioned, out-dated 60’s notion of “real manhood.” Neither John Wayne nor Captain Kirk would have ever been caught playing with cute pastel Ponies. And, come to think of it, neither would have Captain Picard.

For those not keeping score, ‘Bronies’ are male fans of My Little Pony. For those who still aren’t keeping score, yes, you read that right. My Little Pony. The little colorful ponies who are generally seen as the equine analog of the Care Bears.

Lynn’s view is not unusual. I’ve come to know Lynn pretty well after years of online interaction, so I’m pretty confident that when she says she finds it a ‘wee bit creepy’, that’s pretty much what she means: “OK, I’m not gonna lie, that’s kinda weird. But whatever floats your boat.” She’s nowhere near as irritated by Brony existence as some other people I’ve seen online. A recall a while back when I went on one of my rare visits to the FSM message boards and found someone there going off on an extended rant about how Bronies are literally pedophiles.

My reaction to learning the existence of Bronies was twofold: “Huh, OK, whatever” and “Why would anyone of adult age be a fan of those?” Well, apparently the Brony ‘phenomenon’ is centered mainly on the current incarnation of the Ponies on teevee, via the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Having never once seen an episode of this, I had to look up the following on Wikipedia:

The show has been critically praised for its humor and moral outlook. Despite the target demographic of young girls, Friendship Is Magic has, in addition, gained a large following of older viewers, predominately teenagers and adults, largely male, who call themselves “bronies”. Reasons for this unintended appreciation include Faust and her team’s creative writing and characterization, the expressive Flash-based animation style, themes that older audiences can appreciate, and a reciprocal relationship between Hasbro, the creators, and the fans. Elements of the show have become part of the remix culture and have formed the basis for a variety of Internet memes. As a result in part of this unexpected cross-demographic audience interest, the series has become a major commercial success, becoming the most highly rated original production in the Hub’s broadcast history.

So apparently it’s a kid’s show that has been crafted in such a way as to have appeal to older age groups. This is, I suppose, not at all unlike other successful cartoon franchises of long-standing — Looney Tunes, for example, or Tom and Jerry. Again, I’ve never seen any of this, so I can’t personally vouch for it. But I do have a good friend who also happens to be quite the MLP fan, and she strongly recommended that I watch some of Friendship is Magic, describing the show’s sense of humor as ‘delightfully twisted’. I have to admit that I am curious about this, and also that the main reason I haven’t is the same reason I haven’t got around to watching Farscape or the rest of Battlestar Galactica or [insert thing I haven’t seen yet]. I just haven’t got round to it.

I don’t rule out the possibility of me actually liking MLP: Friendship is Magic, either. As kid-stuff goes, I am a huge fan of the show Arthur. Now there‘s a fun show with a ‘delightfully twisted’ sense of humor.

The whole ‘Brony’ thing interests me, though, as a larger part of fandom. I consider myself a fan of lots of stuff, and readers here can probably attest to a lot of it. Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Quentin Tarantino, The Lord of the Rings, Guy Gavriel Kay…yes, I have my fandoms. And yet, I don’t really associate with any other fans of such things, at least not in areas such as online forums which are intended for interaction of fans. I exercise my fandom here, on this blog. And through that, I do meet other folks, and interact with them; but doing so in this way, rather than on dedicated sites, seems to me to allow for a wider connection with fans of things that I like. And it also heightens the likelihood that they are not fans of other stuff that I like, which is fine…but on dedicated sites and such, it can be a bit of a shock.

Back when I actively posted on the FSM boards, and Usenet before them, the conversations pretty much stuck to film music. This led to the phenomenon of discovering that someone with whom I had previously thought I was simpatico with on all things is actually almost completely different from me on everything. Talking passionately about the music of John Williams with someone, only to find out that they are a deeply conservative Republican? In Blogistan, this does not come as a shock at all. But on a dedicated site, it can be a jolt.

I ultimately don’t participate in those kinds of forums because of issues like this. Not because I’m trying to avoid people who aren’t exactly like me, but because when the conversation is that limited to a single topic, no matter how strong the passion can show and how deep the conversation on that topic, you almost never get a good feel for the other person beyond that particular fandom. This was one of the things that drew me to blogging in the first place, way back when: Usenet was just less and less satisfying. If I wanted to talk film music, there was that group. If I wanted to talk books, I had to go to another group — and the denizens of that group weren’t the same as the first. It was this compartmentalizing of fandom that I found so irritating: that I had to remember to which group I was talking about what. As soon as I discovered that I could set up my own spot where I could talk about what I wanted when I wanted, no matter if anyone was listening or not, that was that.

There’s also the fact that people may like the same stuff you do, but in different ways. Fact is, there probably are Bronies who are drawn to it for less than savory reasons. I remember years ago when I discovered other fans of pies in the face AND overalls online — in separate communities — and then realized that they’re fetish communities, with all the gradations that go with such things (meaning, some of which were hard-core). Again, fine if that’s your thing, but not for me, thank you very much. I quickly realized that I had little to no basis on which to interact with those folks, and that was that.

Fandom is an odd thing. It’s personal, but it also makes us crave connections, doesn’t it? So I suppose ultimately the question becomes, what kind of connections do we want. Speaking solely for myself, I don’t want connections that are based on a single shared passion for one particular thing. But, as in all things, that’s just me.

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