2008..in review

So how was your year?

Mine was the usual mixed bag. As I accelerate away from 2008 and into 2009, I thought it was worth looking back and toting up the high and lowlights.

On the Upside:

New Music. The likes of British Sea Power have made this year more entertaining than it would have been. When I was a teenager (some time back in the early 1700s, according to my personnel file at work, which I discovered today has my year of birth as 1699) music was the most important thing in the world. Less so these days. However, there are some excellent bands out there and if anyone feels like recommending some, please feel free.

Good TV. I've watched less of it and spent more time catching up on shows via services like Hulu and Joost. Nevertheless, a cracking season of Doctor Who and the revival of Survivors, accompanied by Fringe and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the ongoing presence of Top Gear and an assortment of decent documentaries from the dear old BBC have meant I still have a use for a TV set.

The Wrinklies. Denizens of an internet forum, or two, and decent thinking people who occasionally read and comment here. Marvellous chaps, all of them.

Facebook. I despise MySpace, but have apparently fallen into the trap of having a Facebook account and posting stuff there. As a social networking site it has been remarkably inefficient for the most part, but it has allowed me to kind of sort of reconnect with a few old friends.

Published! I finally got off my arse and wrote some stuff for a variety of outlets. I got paid - not very much, I admit, but it counts - and I also got to write some Doctor Who stuff for The Celestial Toybox, which is probably what I'm most proud of (unless you count an ongoing fanfic idea that I don't seem to be able to stop tinkering with and probably deserves a blog of it's own). Let's be honest, it's a small start, but after years of doubt and buggering about I achieved that small start, and I'm delighted. The new year's resolution for 2009 is to write more, and better.

Work. I recently came to the conclusion that the company I work for has no clue what I do or why it's important. Last year, I came to the same conclusion but from the opposite end and it left me feeling awful. It's hard to have a lot of responsibility and be under pressure with no way to pass any of the burden off; it's harder still to never be recognised for it. This year, this week in fact, I realised how much freedom I have. If they don't know what I'm doing or how I'm doing it that gives me vast leeway to do it my way. So while the focus of my team is on client and customer, I'm burrowing off into the infrastructure and learning how and why it all works.

Plus, the Band. The Relo Rockers, for whom I write the odd lyric here and there, has got me praise for the thing I love. And what praise! "Why is he here? He's brilliant" said one, while another told me "What's someone as creative as you doing working in that department?"

So, at this point, they can say what they want to me. I have a plan.


On the Downside:

If you've read the blog you know. If you don't know, read the blog.

There are more ups than downs.

And I wanted a pithy comment to put here, something to round it all out, say something simple and clear, but it hasn't been that sort of year. I've got a difficult and painful time ahead of me, nothing that 2009 holds is going to be easy. In fact, I think most of it is going to be quite unpleasant. I can be cowed by this and hide under the covers, or I can admit my faults and failings, patch them as best I can and get on with it.

The only way to meet the year is head on.

Come on, then, 2009. If you think you're hard enough.

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The Next Doctor

I can encapsulate this Christmas special thusly:

It was Doctor Who - wonderful nonsense.

There. Done. Assorted fellow fans have griped about the ending, and I don't disagree with them entirely. Here's why:

The Cyber-King is pointless. It is just a huge stompy steampunk robot. The Doctor's babbled explanation that it's a dreadnought class ship with a conversion factory inside is mystifying because it comes out of nowhere - (however, see later for Amusing Fan Theory #23811) - these are Cybusmen, after all, and he doesn't know that much about them (however, see later for Amusing Fan Theory #431), and also the monster with the conversion factory is only useful if it stops to capture people to convert them. There are really two reasons to have the vast stompy robot.

1: It's impressive as all hell. Cyberzilla. This is pure spectacle, a triumph for The Mill, all very Iron Gianty.

2: It pulls the bad guys away from the humans and isolates them. The Doctor is forced to ascend to face Ms. Hartigan and is therefore also isolated. The human drama goes on at street level, while the gods duke it out up above.

The interesting stuff, for me, is that the clash of elements and concepts. The ending is very Heaven vs Hell. We have seen how the cybermen have been lurking in the sewers (again! is it a tradition with them? "We're in London, lads, let's hide in the sewers!"), which they have transformed into their base of steampunk operations, but this isn't the forge of Vulcan...it's closer to the scenes we saw in Isengard, or in some of Bosch's paintings. It's an underworld, it's Hell. Filling it with terrified innocents is rather a blunt metaphor for what happens when people seek revenge. Then the cybermen rise, with a scarlet woman riding the head of the Beast, and we're ini Revelations territory. Everything about the cybes at this point is about the Underworld - even the fact that they are steel, and riding a giant made of iron, Ms. Hartigan is wearing red (a ferrous colour, as well as the colour of flame and passion)... it's all biblical.

And it goes on!

Having risen, the CyberKing is confronted by the Doctor in a balloon. Here we have the element of air vs the element of Earth, or Heaven facing down Hell. Hell is legion, Heaven is just the one bloke. But we also know that the Doctor is more than a flesh and blood individual; more and more we've had it demonstrated that the Doctor is a set of ideas and principles; when Lake has his brain rewired by the infostamp, he absorbs the qualities of The Doctor and then becomes him. So the Doctor isn't necessarily a person, he can be a concept, an ethereal notion.

Then we get the Doctor's offer: come with me if you want to live.

He's got to make that offer. It's the Good Guy Rule. Only a villain or an anti-hero can kill without first offering the chance for redepmtion or peace. Even if the Doctor knows the answer before he makes the offer, he has to make it otherwise he's "just another alien threat". That we all know, as he does, what the answer will be is neither here nor there. Everyone believes he's the hero, he has to act like the hero. He also, as he points out, gets forced into being the executioner.

That's the price that the 10th Doctor has paid for his freedom. If the monsters have nightmares about the Doctor, it's because they force him to become the thing they fear the most. As fans, we know what the Doctor really wants. He wants to go and have fun, preferably with people he loves, and that is constantly denied him. He says that his companions leave because they find someone else, or because they have to, and he knows that his life - and the presence of the monsters, and what they make him into - is why his companions leave. The anger he shows in the moment before he zaps the CyberKing, is because yet again he's being forced to take responsibility for the actions of monsters; while the Doctor wouldn't ever turn his back on someone in need, he's becoming tired of the price he has to pay.

Which is why he accepts dinner. And why he hangs around for the applause.

The Amusing Fan Ideas.

How Does The Doctor Know So Bloody Much?
- like, how did he know about the CyberKing?

The answer is that he doesn't. The Doctor stumbles into a situation and stares at it for a few seconds, then starts talking. There are two possibilities here:

1: He's making it up. Who'd know the difference?

2: The TARDIS has all the answers, and is feeding them to him. After all, the TARDIS is alive and a vastly powerful time machine with telepathic circuits that can get into the heads of humans and aliens alike. There's no reason it couldn't have had a wander around in the Cyberleader's head, or the heads of the Cybermen when the Doctor met and spoke with them.

Let's not forget, the Doctor may not actually speak English. He might be speaking Gallifreyan and we're just hearing English because of the Tardis. This has to hold true for all of the monsters he meets too - the TARDIS has access to their brains because it's translating for him. If it can read the language centers, it can probably read everything else too - including memories.

Thus, when the TARDIS has information that it knows the Doctor wants, it supplies that information. However, the TARDIS has a sense of the dramatic; it never tells the Doctor the entire story and it never gives him all the answers he needs. Thus, it occurs to me that the Doctor is, in fact, being strung along by the TARDIS for the ship's own amusement.

Why Did The Cybusmen Build a CyberKing?

Mostly for all of the reasons in the main post above, I think, but here's another theory.

Since the events of Silver Nemesis the universe has technically been without Cybermen. These alternate versions, on entering the Doctor Who universe, have encountered a phenomena unique to that reality: the morphogenic field.

The Morphogenic Field is one of the things that binds the universe together and ensures that most aliens are humanoid and most of them speak to communicate instead of using lights, hand gestures, complex dances, smells etc. It also ensures that certain things keep happening; it's the source of Narrative Causality. In this case, for example, the reason that the Cybermen build a giant to go stomping over London is because of the following threads of Narrative Causality:

1: Godzilla. Giant monsters flatten cities after rising from improbably shallow bodies of water.

2: Gog and Magog, the giants and protectors of London.

3: The Cybermen of our universe might have created a Cyberking, and the Cybusmen are slowly being changed by exposure to the Morphogenic Field.

4: You've got to have giant robots. Where the technology exists to have a giant robot, a giant robot is the outcome. Humans of a certain type seem irresistably drawn to giant robots.

anyway, that's that.

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'Twas Christmas Day in the Workhouse

I thought today might be a bit rough.

You know, what with one thing and another. It turned out not to be.

Various denizens of the apartment complex were merry, one guy dancing in his doorway having attacked the Christmas spirit with a couple of straws. The Soon To Be Ex Wife came over with the kids. They bought me a kettle, a posh one with a base unit that turns itself off. I like those.

In terms of loot, I also scored some rather fine tea (and have drunk a pot of Chai by myself, me really knowing how to push the boat out in no uncertain terms). I also have a Starbucks and Barnes and Noble Giftcard. Barnes and Noble will shortly be in receipt of their card in exchange for a couple of books; they don't have the range that Amazon has but since any books I buy in the next year are either going on ebay or being shipped home, I will wait for making landfall in the UK before attacking the books on the Amazon wishlist.

Anyway, I ate a non-christmas dinner and I have watched a bit of TV - on Joost, as it happens - and have done a bit of reading.

I'm tired now. The last couple of weeks have been exhausting, but today I'm really feeling it. I shall sleep shortly; assuming I don't pick up The Alienist by Caleb Carr, because it's a psychological profiling hunting serial killers book set in the late part of the 19th century, and because it's a foodie book. The author constructs some truely astounding meals, and reading them is actually nicer than eating them would be.

This is my third christmas on my own, which isn't bad considering my age, and I find that just for once the hoopla and the fuss isn't being missed at all. I'll take the peace and quiet, thanks, and hope that if you're reading this your coming year is also peaceful and quiet.

Merry Christmas.

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Domestic bliss?

I haven't decided what to call the new place yet.

For those interested, I'm living in a single bedroom apartment in a small complex in Phoenix. I have four rooms: the kitchen is tiny and I have a walk in closet that is nearly as big, so I count them as half a room each.

It looks a bit like the picture above. In fact, that's my sofa.

I have, of course already altered it. That arm chair? Right to the table where the PC is currently located. The complex has wifi, so that's what's connecting me to this. The kitchen is to the left, and the bed (which offers superior corrective massage when I'm out) you can just see to the right.

In a fit of domestic pride, I cleaned the oven when I got home from work today. This is partly me being house proud and partly me not wanting a colossal cleaning bill when I move out.

In the meantime, between worrying vaguely about laundry and sorting out all the tedious ephemera of changing addresses, I am attempting to write. It's not easy. The laundry, while not pressing, weighs on my mind. And to be perfectly honest, the bed is like sleeping on sticks wrapped around granite, so I could do with a kip. Perhaps the couch?

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Mutating Language

It sort of bothers me when people take a phrase and get it wrong, and then defend their wrongness. It bothers me even more when they claim that the language is changing and that I should "get with it" or somesuch nonsense.

Recently encountered howlers:

"that would be a bit of a damp squid."
- the word is "squib". Saying a squid is damp is...silly. Of course it's damp. It lives under water.

"Lip-singing"
- have you tried singing without lips? It's "Lip-synch", because you synchronise the movement of your lips to the playback.

"to be pacific"
- because you are not an ocean, and because you mean "specific".

"irregardless"
- double negative hell-word.

I think particular ire should be reserved for those who insist on propagating their ignorance and defying correction. I don't think we need go as far as pillorying, or burning at the stake, but I do think a rolled-up newspaper to the forehead might be instructive.

Of course, anyone using the word "irregardless" probably also uses the phrase "pro-active" and that's a shooting offence.

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Heroes: Fugitives

And it looks like they've hired a writer for the next season. OK, I will be watching.

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

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More Sarah Connor

"Earthlings Welcome Here" is the finale of the current run; Sarah believes she has a lead to a company that is developing Skynet type technology, via blogger, and Riley strays from her mission somewhat.

The long and the short is: good ep. Through Riley, we get to see the effect of the transition between Skynet future and our present. Out of her environment, Riley behaves very much like someone who has been institutionalised. Her responses to the various stimuli of her life are not always appropriate and she has great difficulty fitting in. Even her interaction with John is becoming more strained and tense, which Cameron has noted. Riley, friendless and disconnected, locks herself in a bathroom and slashes her wrists. We are not reassured as to her fate.

Sarah's fate also remains unresolved, and as the widget over there --> tells us, it's 60 days until the next episode.

Crap.

It's a very low key cliffhanger. In both cases, there's genuinely something to be worried about because for both characters the future is uncertain. They have threatened two people we have grown to care for.

Riley, though a secondary character and not one I have really paid much attention to before, is really pretty good. For a while I hoped that she was representative of the normal life that John Connor wasn't going to get. As it turns out, she's a honeytrap and just there to distract him from his relationship with Cameron. Nevertheless, Riley has more to her than this simple mission and our current revelation - that she was never a soldier - is nicely portrayed by a flash-forward to her marginal life in the corners of John Connor's campaign and then a flash back to her arriving in present day California and exploring the simple pleasures of a not so upscale motel room.

Sarah, meanwhile, is chasing UFOs and UFO believers because of some drone type technology. The interesting thing here is that Sarah once more lingers over the people she was; we have images of Sarah Connor in a waitress's uniform (which is what she did for a living way back in Terminator) and a much harder version in the scrubs she wore in the mental institution, complete with spinning knife and "No Fate" carved into a tabletop.

So who is Sarah Connor? Like Riley, she's essentially alone. John is exhibiting greater and greater independance, Cameron can protect him far more efficiently than she can...is her usefulness as a parent at an end?

And are they really doing this? Come on! Surely this "children grow up and leave home and stop needing you" stuff is more suited to Gilmore Girls. Surely this is the dreaded Sope! much reviled by Doctor Who fandom?

Yeah. It really is. And it's really nicely done too. It sneaks in, it infiltrates.

There's also some stuff from Shirley Manson and teaching an AI about religion (which has got to be the worst thing to teach a computer! Do we really want a Fundamentalist AI?). It's going to be important later, you can hear this particular gun being loaded and set on the mantlepiece.

I've changed my mind since the last post about this show.
Watch this.

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Heroes! Bit of an experiment.

In an attempt to show how the cuts and switches affect the show, here's a recap, taken from notes that were taken as the show played on Hulu.

...perviously, on Heroes:

Hiro is stuck back in time sixteen years ago, hanging off a flagpole.
Arthur is not Sylar;s daddy, and Peter is not a killer.
And we get a homily not from Mohinder but from...Sylar. Who says
"what we choose is never what we truly need, for that is the ultimate cosmic joke, That is the real gift god has left behind".

And now Peter wants to destroy the formula and Nathan wants to inject another dozen marines with the formula.

Nathan has officially adopted his dad's scheme. And he tells Peter "either you're with me..."
Meanwhile Noah grabs a couple of shotguns and prepares to go hunting while Sylar takes over the Company facility, having murdered all the guards, and taunts everyone. Claire and Sylar have a little heart to heart. Having locked everyone in the level 5 facilitym he tells them he's going to show them they're all monsters exactly like him....wait. Who does that remind you of? Is he replaying The Killing Joke?

Meanwhile, back at Hiro...
Well, not with Hiro, Parkman and Ando and the speedster girl are at Mohinder's place, but he's not there and they realise that they need Mohinder. Who is dying in a scaley and messy manner. He's going to try the new formula, but here comes Petey the Punisher with a gun. There's a discussion which goes nowhere useful other than getting all the formula trashed. There is a blur of wind, the formula vanishes, and it is delivered to Ando, who injects himself. We have a bit of a theoretical discussion about abilities: people seem to get the things they believe they need most - Matt used to worry about what people thought of him and he learned to read minds. Of course, we don't see the transformation right away...we cut to -

Sylar's mindgame: he offers Claire the option of getting out alive, with Noah and Biomom, in return for shooting Angela. Claire refuses, and shoots a telephone instead.

And we cut to Noah. He's released all the maniacs in Level 5 and promised them freedome if they kill Sylar. He mentions that he's really released them as bait.

Back to Ando and company, who are testing Ando's new ability...which he doesn't appear to have, until he punches something.

Back to Sylar. Creepy puppeteer guy attempts to mind control Sylar and fails. Sylar injects biomom with adrenalin, at which point she loses control of her powers.

And then cut to Noah, who finds Meredith (biomom) in a Level 5 Cell. Sylar locks him in, with a gun and a single bullet, and gives Noah a choice - burn to death or kill Meredith and have to explain himself to Claire.

Back to Nathan, who is pontificating. He starts a fight with a guy who becomes stronger as people become more fearful. Nathan is saved from an asskicking by his blonde icemaiden, who kills the strongman.

Back to Ando, who has discovered that he can amplify the powers of others. Matt can suddenly hear the minds of everyone, and it seems his girlfriend , once touched, moves so fast she goes back in time.

Meanwhile, we're with Sylar and Claire as Claire attempts to save her parents. Which she does. There is an odd moment as Claire asks her thermobaric mother to come with her, but mommy, who is unable to stop generating flames, won't. Claire looks all fierce and says "I''m coming back for you". Which is good because the adrenalin will wear off eventually.

Nathan and Ice maiden are talking spin control. Nathan fires her.

Back at Ando, a plan to rescue Hiro is hatched.

Hiro, and his younger self, go after the formula. And get it, only to be confronted by Hiro;s dad. George Takei goes all Samuri, wielding a big sword. The formula is ripped in half.

Icemaiden steals the formula and is about to walk off with it when Hiro and the Speedster turn up. Icemaiden calls Hiro "Pikachu".

Meanwhile, back with Peter, the lab trashing is over. Mohinder is swamped with formula and is cured, then Peter and Nathan beat each other up.

The lan burns, and Peter jabs himself with formula, getting his powers back and saving Nathan and flying out of the inferno.

Back to Sylar and Angela. Angela attempts to convince Sylar that she's been in his corner all along. It backfires. Angela admits that the Sylar is not her son, and then she lies about her motives. And then she admits everything, and offers Sylar the truth about his parents. He's about to get it when Claire stabs him in the neck - her one weak spot and therefore his too.

Meredith is about to go Supernova and there is a tearful goodbye.

And back to Peter and Nathan. Peter saved Nathan because they are brothers.

And the end monologue is Mohinder, but things appear to be reset. The formula is gone, everyone but Hiro has their powers back. Then we go to...

Three weeks later, where Nathan has sold everyone out to the US Government. Nathan wants to round everyone up and put them in prison.

Oh, and the president is a youngish black guy.

So we've had "Arkham Asylum" and now shades of the X-Men too. Ah, onward.

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So, Frank Said...

...would I recommend The Sarah Connor Chronicles?

And I wouldn't want to set Frank up with anything less than something good.

The premise of the show is solid. It takes place after Terminator 2; the future is still there to fight for, Sarah Connor is alive, John is a teenager and another Terminator has been sent back to protect John from Skynet.

Good Things:

Lena Heady. She plays Sarah Connor and picks up the character notes from T2; Sarah is well on her way to becoming a machine, at least emotionally, in order to protect John. Lena does this very effectively, she's chilling and precise and ruthless. The character gets plenty of time to crack, too, and show the very human interior which is basically a mother doing anything and everything for her child.

Shirley Manson. She plays Catherine Weaver, head of a really advanced research company with an interest in AI. She's chilly, remote, she even looks forbidding and a bit sterile. Catherine Weaver has a daughter that is scared of her, and apparently very few social skills. Shirely Manson does much the same thing as Lena Heady, but is a mirror to her because Catherine Weaver is an advanced T-1001 and is learning a lot about being human, including how to parent.

Not, you understand, in a Star Trek "grasp the human factor" way. In calculating, let's be a perfectly disguised terminator way.

Summer Glau. She plays Cameron, a Terminator reprogrammed to protect John Connor. Summer Glau is a very physical actor; a lot of her performance is in body position and movement. In this case, she has "machine" down to something graceful and not quite beautiful. She also gets to emote from time to time, which is amusing to see in some respects and worrying in others.

Time Travel. Like I said in a recent post, this show could possibly be exploring paradox and free will, and doing so in quite a sly and clever way.

Bad Things

Time Travel. The biggest issue I have with the show is that it treats time travel like Star Trek treats the Transporter - as a way of introducing new characters or situations. No bad thing, but there are a number of plot problems here.

First - how does Skynet know when a plan has failed?
Typically, a circumstances arises and Skynet responds to this by sending a Terminator into the past in order to undo or prevent it. This immediately creates a paradox, right? And the only way to resolve the paradox is for everything to stay just as it was. No matter what happens, Skynet will be born, Judgement Day will happen, John Connor will unite humanity - what's left of it - against the machines and the events of Terminator and T2 will happen. Sarah Connor's mantra "No fate but what we make" is just a lie she tells herself to stop feeling out of control.

The other issue is how fractious and divided and annoying some of the humans are. You'd think that facing extinction would be the one thing that stops humans being bitchy and political, but apparently not. Granted, having the humans be less than the full on shaved ape would be making the whole thing too black and white, too easy to understand: meat good, machine bad. Even so, does everyone from the future need to have an agenda? A good example is a character who presents herself as essentially being a refugee from the war, a soldier who ran away to the years before Judgement Day, and who seems intent on enjoying some actual life. While this is an engaging character point, and while stories can certainly be woven around this, the writers instead opted to tell us that really there is a plot by the humans to manipulate John Connor so he doesn't have such warm fuzzy feelings towards certain types of terminator. It's all a bit Machiavellian; perhaps it doesn't need to be, perhaps there's plenty going on?

Or perhaps this is just the writers attempting to steer the show away from the "terminator of the week" syndrome that looms, or allows them to give Sarah Connor a home to defend and a single location for us to get used to?

Do I recommend it? Not sure.

It's not the most innovative or deep show on TV at the moment, but it's worth watching on something like Hulu. It's taken a couple of pages out of BSG's book, it works and it has some engaging performances and interesting stories. I make room for it on a weekly basis, because it does do things that BSG doesn't do. It has a sense of humour. It answers questions. It gives the villains a human face without making them human or wannabe human.

Yeah. I like it. Are there better things a person with a packed schedule could be watching?

Almost certainly. But it's sufficiently different to other prime time shows for me to say "Check out a couple of episodes, and see whether it makes you want to watch more". I have the strong feeling this is a marmite show.

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What was it I did for a living, again?

I work in Relocation. International relocation specifically, although there's not that much of it around at the moment. The company I work for, and I shall mention no names because you know how these blog get around, is a company that also does relocation within the USA and separates the two groups of business into Domestic and International.

International is really about Assignment Management. People are shipped off around the world for periods lasting between a couple weeks and many years. In the meantime, some unbelievably complex things happen to their financial status and their tax burden, and we also have to arrange shipment of things like household goods and schooling for kids...all manner of malarky.

The people I work with are unbelievably diverse. Between us we represent 22 nationalities and speak 29 languages; we have six major faiths (three of which are Christian offshoots, but they count) and a panoply of accents.

Everyone who works on that team, with the exception of my wife, has lived or worked abroad and has an understanding of what it is to be a stranger in a strange land.

They are an incredibly interesting bunch of people.

The work itself is beyond complicated and very people intensive. Part of our accounting function is based in India, because processing expenses and suchlike is a huge drain on resources, and a large part of our jobs ends up being jousting with the Outsourced beancounters about what they should or should not allow. One of the ironic things is that they regularly deny expenses that are accompanied by receipts that are not in English.

First, if you have ever been to Korea, or China, have you tried getting a receipt in English? This works the same for Iceland too.

Second, do you see the irony of a company in India, where there are about eleventy major languages, complaining about documents not being in English?

Other interesting things are afoot too. One of the things you can do in my job is watch trends. For example - if you want to know where the best place in the world to hire cheap workers is, watch the relocation and assignment patterns of some of the major companies. For the last couple of years, I have been looking at Africa and I've decided that if it could sort itself out there are parts of Africa that would be ideal for the kind of thing that India currently does. Capitalism is driving upgrades in the standard of living westwards, away from China and back towards Europe. In a couple of centuries, the Low Countries and France will be where it's all happening. History is cyclical in so many respects.

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A Rather Cluttered Day

I still don't talk about me, much, but...

I have found somewhere else to live, I think, subject to me proving that I can pay rent and am not a serial killer. I might post a link to it at some point.

I have made plans to return to the UK via Aer Lingus, always supposing that they will take me.

I have sorted out how much it costs to outfit a little place of my own. The answer is "a lot", but it's all doable.

And now, some Other Stuff.

Insomnia TV, Again.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

For the first time since I started following this show, it bored me.
I don't think it was the show's fault, necessarily, because I have a really short attention span just now.
However; the plot is that Skynet has used a bio weapon and it turns out that one person is immune. That person produces antibodies which give John Connor's mob a cure. So Skynet sends a Terminator back to kill the person in the past. Sarah Connor and chums arrive on the scene to prevent this.
It turns out that the person with the immunity hasn't been born yet, and has only recently been conceived, so all heck breaks loose and many people run around being chased by a terminator. The clueless family - those crazy n00bs - get in the way, but eventually sort themselves out and the cure is safeguarded.

The Time Travel aspect of the show is interesting, as ever, as is the idea that the two realities seem to be contiguous. On the one hand, Skynet is fighting to change the past so that it wins. Given that the world is chaotic and that sending a Terminator back to kill things with explosions and big guns is effectively using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, it seems overly simple. If this was up to the 7th Doctor, for example, he would simply arrange for the family to be left alone and then quietly relocate them to ground zero of one of the Judgement Day bombs, thus ensuring that they are all vaporised. By sending the Terminator back, Skynet ensures that the targets know all about Skynet and the future, so they are in the right places at the right times. Is this evil sewing the seeds of it's own destruction or a hint that machines cannot have free will? Or what?

Heroes

Have I mentioned that this show is going off the rails on a crazy train?
No?
This show is going off the rails on a crazy train.

In this week's exciting episode:

Matt, Ando and Speedy Girl recover the missing edition of 9th Wonders, the prescient comic book.
Sylar kills Kirsten, and seems to once more be evil. He embarks on a killing spree, picking up powers the old fashioned way. He kills one poor office girl who is a human lie detector. It's also her birthday. Co-workers arrive with cake and balloons just as a Sylar, gory to the elbows, rises from the corpse. "Oooo" says Sylar "Cake!" and telekinetically slams the door behind them.
Peter and the Haitian go to kill Arthur Petrelli.
Hiro and Claire are sixteen years ago, because Hiro is ten and wants to show Claire that her dad loved her really. Then he sees his mummy and runs off to pretend to be a chef.
Claire messes with the past, preventing herself becoming the Catalyst.
Hiro instead becomes the catalyst, having had his mind restored by his mum, who is a healer. Handing over the catalyst kills his mum. Hiro and Claire meet, and bloody Arthur Petrelli shows up out of fucking nowhere to strip Hiro of his powers, and the Catalyst, and throw him off a roof.
Then, there is the big Scene of Doom as Nathan discovers a Super Soldier Project, using Arthur's catalysed blood to make the injection stable, and then goes along with it. A marine is injected and goes all superstrong. Meanwhile, upstairs the Haitian and Peter ambush Arthur. With his powers suppressed, Arthur looks constipated and Peter entirely fails to shoot him in the head until the very last moment, when Sylar appears out of fucking nowhere and telekineticaly stops the bullet in midair. He asks Arthur "Are you my father?" and Arthur says yes, and he's lying, so Sylar lets the bullet go. Arthur Petrelli is dead.

I bet he isn't. He's got all the powers under the sun at the moment so it's a matter of time before he sits up or steps out of fucking nowhere to do something arch and pointless or strip someone of their powers.

I'm prompted to swearing about this because it's just so annoying. I want someone to break the 4th wall, preferably someone who looks uncannily like Animal Man or Grant Morrison or someone, and just say
"Gosh, it's uncanny how you do that. It's like you were standing just off camera!"

I also want Arthur Petrelli dead for good. He's annoying me. Imagine if this happened in any other TV show. What if Horatio Caine was about to deploy the Justice Shades and Arthur Petrelli appeared out of fucking nowhere and stamped on them?

Or, if The Doctor was just about to charge down a corridor and burst into a room with a sudden inspiration only to have Arthur Petrelli appear out of fucking nowhere and slam a door in his face, causing a regeneration and subsequent post-regenerative amnesia in which the Doctor forgets everything (including his shoe size..."These shoes! I have no idea if they fit at all!")?

Next week, we learn whether Arthur Petrelli is dead and whether Sylar is going to turn good on the basis that gas prices are down and there's a T in the day.

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Ten Things About Me.

I am not used to this, so forgive me if it goes a little odd.

1: I hate talking about myself. You know this, but this is why: I would much prefer to talk about you, you are far more interesting and have lots more to teach me than I probably have to pass on to you. It's not like I've lead a dull life, but I find talking about myself almost unforgivably rude.

2: I can't not answer questions if I think I have the answer. Or even if I think I think I know the answer. It's a flaw, I know, but it's like a nervous tic.

3: Just at the moment, I'm not really me. I write like me and I can type like me but I don't feel like me. Yes, I'm currently going through some quite unpleasant things and I was expecting to be a bit out of sorts but today and most of this week it feels like I'm wearing me like a coat. And I hate it.

4: I am, I think, bipolar. And from what I understand I have an up and down cycle that is massively long. From experience, I have depressions and manic periods that last about three or four days each with a curve to both extremes that lasts weeks. Right now, I am manic. I have had insomnia for the past week, resulting in a sleepless night last night and a day of utter energy and scattered thinking today. I feel stretched, wound out, racked, and totally aware. My head is so clear and my ability to put things together - ideas, plans, concepts - is really sharp. The downside is that thinking about anything for more than a few minutes is like sandpaper.

I am not currently being treated. I ought to be. Right now, thanks to American medical care, I can't afford to get treated. In January, though, I am planning to see a doctor.

Edit: Since 5:30am yesterday I have had perhaps two hours sleep. It is 22:23, and I am still not able to relax my brain enough to sleep.

5: I love the art of the con. Perhaps more than any other aspect of human expression and endeavor, it reveals tons about who we are and what we want, and how we think we can get it. I particularly love the artistry involved in setting up and playing out the con. Unfortunately, the more I look for cons the more of them I see. So I try not to look. But when one comes up no matter how appalling the damage it's done, I can't help myself...I smile, and very occasionally I cheer just a little bit.

6: I tell fortunes. I can read Tarot cards, and I can cold read well enough to read palms. It's a con, I've no psychic talent at all - although sometimes people claim I've been accurate enough to surprise them. Of course, reading Tarot cards is technically not psychic, it's magic. Cartomancy. So maybe practicing that Art is what I'm doing and the person I'm conning is me. Or not. The point is, I don't trust "psychics", because I have found it ridiculously easy to pretend to be one.

7: I met my wife online, through a site that has since become defunct. We messaged, corresponded and spoke for nine months, met and married within three days, were separated for a further ten months and believed that having got through all of this we could meet practically any challenge. Of course, the things we weren't prepared for were the changes in ourselves. We're not the people who put themselves through two years of living at a distance; we changed because the tensions and stresses of being together, the peculiar stresses on me being a stranger in a strange land...an evolution took place in my wife and I did not evolve in the same way. I've been, in retrospect, badly depressed for two years and should have noticed something or done something much sooner. Instead, I withdrew as far as I could and tried to fix myself. I should have asked for help, demanded it. Be that as it may, I have some very happy memories and experiences, and I would not have chosen to do this differently. I have learned. The future will be better.

8: I write. Most of the time I write garbage. I love to write; I have written for H2G2, I have written for assorted sites and purposes, and I have written some fan fic. I have also written for CT, something that gives me a sense of pride that I have not felt in years. I used to write at school; kids do this - creating amusing fictions for groups of friends, portraying themselves as heroes. For me it was a way to express something that I wasn't being allowed to express by life. I am still very interested in writing, in the act and the technical details, in the how and the why. I wish I could create stories in as prolific a manner as some other writers because there is, honestly, no better feeling.

OK, there are one or two better feelings.

I write at work too. It's not strictly parody but I do re-write popular songs for the nefarious purposes of a singing group. They sing at company events, like major meetings. I am known as the lyricist and have been told I am brilliant. That's nice, of course, and I hope it's true. It would be nice to be noticed for doing something I enjoy. Adore. It's fun, and it seems like cheating to get applause for being happy.

9: The first book I remember reading was an Asterix book. When you're small, it seems unlikely that heroes would live in any other country but your own and the translations of those gorgeous books and stories were utterly engaging. I also read the James Blish novelisations of Star Trek, the Target novelisations of Doctor Who, and a bunch of science fiction novels. I remember something called Dragonfall Five, and a novel called Trillions, and a surprising amount of John Wyndham. I'd started with "Chocky" and graduated to "Day of the Triffids" before I'd found stuff like Tolkein or Douglas Adams. I'd also developed a lingering fondness for Ian Fleming. Not the Bond books - those came later - but for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which had a recipie for fudge in the last chapter. Whenever I took the book out of the library I would pester to be allowed to make the fudge; sometimes I was.

The end result is a love for escapist books. Science fiction more than fantasty, and it wasn't until much later that I realised how lucky Trekkies were to have James Blish and Joe Haldeman writing Trek stories or novelising the TV show.

I still love words and pictures. I admit a lingering fondness for the words, on paper, in a book with pages that slip and slide between fingers and slap shut, and flick. And I particularly adore second hand books that people have made notes in. It's like getting two books in one, and having a second hand book is like rescuing a puppy from the pound with the advantage that it won't eat your shoes and shit everywhere.

10: This was going to be sixteen things, but I am reaching the point where I can't concentrate on it any more. Sandpaper, and reticence.

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Alert! Avian Flu - Poultry Outbreak - Hong Kong

The title of this post was the subject line of an e-mail I got at work.

We get pandemic reports at work, simply because we have people traveling
all over the world and an outbreak of something nasty can cause travelers
all kinds of problems.

H5 hasn't crossed the species barrier yet, so it's not as big a deal as
everyone is thinking, and with luck it's just a matter of time before we
come up with an effective defense against it.  However, the headline itself
made me think of a Hong Kong terrorized by gangs of roaming chickens that spontaneously appear, thanks to a sort of viral interaction
with urban decay.  Sort of like "Night of the Living Dead", but with
chickens.

I even had this cinematic shot of a helicopter surveying the terror
stricken streets, high above HK, with a middle aged Charlton Heston sitting
in the door gunner position of a Huey - surely the archetypal helicopter
now - looking out over the streets and just saying "My Ghaaaaaaaaaad", in
that way that he did, to the faint background sound of a million chickens
going "Cluck?"

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Transparency?

It's an idea I've picked up from David Brin (his blog is over there, on the right) and it's one I have decided I rather like.

There are a host of reasons. The main one is: I love my privacy. I don't, in any sense, have any. I have no expectation of privacy at work, where my phone can be tapped and my computer keystrokes recorded and logged for later, and I have no expectation at home because I live with other humans. We all need space, but we can't all have it at the same time. Google stores my search habits, banks and stores store my buying habits. I'm tracked, data mined, coded and analysed every minute of every day.

Which is OK with me.

On the other hand, while I am perfectly happy to have all of this happen - it's apparently the consequence of a lifestyle that I rather like - I am not so happy that there are elements of the world which are not subject to the same rules.

It irks me that while I can hide nothing from the IRS, whole political parties obviously can. I am annoyed that if I question how a major company is spending money I am not allowed to find out the answers. I would quite like to have access to all of that information.

Would I use it?
Well, no, probably not. I think the ordinary schlub, like me, probably wouldn't. I believe, though, that there are a sufficient number of people who would in order to make the total societal transparency that David Brin espouses (and which is still a really good idea) very unlikely. I think a society grown so used to lying, and being lied to, is probably not going to handle truth very well.

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Insomnia TV Too

Meanwhile, back at Hulu...

The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The story sort of continues. Riley, a rather nice young blond, is making further attempts to get into the teenage John Connor's underwear and keep him from spending time with Cameron. We now know that Riley has been sent back from the future to do exactly this, because the adult John Connor is far closer to terminators than he is people. This is a nice little development from the T2 film, in which we learn that John has formed an emotional attachment to the Arnie model. Meantime, Cameron has made friends with a night-shift librarian and is taking an abiding interest in local history.

As the episode progresses, John engages in a beat-down and finally snogs - and possibly sleeps with - Riley. Cameron discovers that a terminator (which are starting to suffer from Hero Gun complex) has been sent back too far and has decided to take the "long road" to the present day in order to carry out its mission.

Hero Gun complex: the heroes can hit things quite happily, but super-accurate terminators that can lay waste an FBI Hostage Rescue team can't take out a single one of them. It's annoying, because we know that the heroes are only going out in a season finale or a self sacrificing blaze of glory. In a show like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, this is probably necessary because the ensemle cast is small. It does take away from the tension, though, because a show that appears to be nihilistic in outlook (but isn't) has the capacity to be a lot more dangerous than this.

What's refreshing is that while Cameron has been made to appear sympathetic, she's not. She is still very much a machine, cares as much for one person as another, as we see when she treats the disappearance of her "friend" in the library with a moment's disconnection and then indifference. Summer Glau does an excellent job with this - she's hauntingly pretty and by the standards of American TV this must mean she's really good on the inside. Not so, as far as we can tell. She does a better job of this than Arnie.

Hereos

The Eclipse Part Two.

In which everyone gets their powers back.
This is predictable enough, I knew this was coming, and in the end it's just a reset switch of the worst kind.
For example - Noah slits Sylar's throat. And yet Sylar - who absorbed Claire's healing powers - returns at the end of the eclipse, covered in his own blood and angry.

This is still a very troubled show. The parts of the story with any satisfactory weight to them are the ones involving Hiro and Ando, the team for which the writers have very obvious affection, and Matt Parkman and his girlfriend. This is turning into a nice little redemption story.

Sylar, meanwhile, turns mean again. Look, guys, settle will you? Even Pro Wrestling maintains a face or heel turn longer and more consistently than this. Sylar is the human lightswitch of characters, from darkness to light a couple of times an episode. Now it's not about Sylar playing a complex game to outwit everyone and be his own person, it's a massively annoying inability of the writers to pick a trait and tell a story. Sylar as a badass villain works. Sylar struggling against his own power works. Sylar playing both halves of the Petrelli conspiracy against the middle works. But seeing him be all three in the same episode is just annoying.

I have actually now stopped caring about Nathan and Peter Petrelli. Nathan has suddenly and mysteriously, and with wonderful automagically applied illogic, decided to side with Dad because, as near as I can work out, making people superheroes would solve all world problems instead of creating hundreds of new ones. He rattles off a list of problem areas - Darfur being one of them - and seems to think that the presence of a person with abilities would make things better. It's clear that Senator Nathan Petrelli is a moron, driven by the plot's need to split the family down the middle he needs to stay one on a regular basis. I would say this is lazy writing, but I know better than that; it's not lazy, but it might be a sign of writers trying to arrange a situation that they can retcon later. That's something I don't like.

Fringe

The basic story, that there is a conspiracy afoot to do strange things with science, proceeds. This week's goodness includes:

Breaking into bank vaults by walking through walls.
Jailbreaks through time and space.
Cow grooming.
Walter makes inappropriate comments.
Shared memories.

We've also got an arc in progress, featuring a prisoner in Germany from a previous episode, but in order to explain it all, I would need to recap the story to date. Not gonna.

Fringe is worth watching, and then comparing to Torchwood, and then deliberately forgetting about Torchwood. It's turning up on British TV soon and I advise it be watched.

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Insomnia TV

In the last week or so, I haven't been sleeping much and while not sleeping I have been watching TV and catching up on shows I have missed on Hulu.

So. Some reviews.

Heroes is all a bit complicated.

So...the Petrelli family continues with it's twisty ways, totally unable to be in the same place without hating one another. Angela's paralysis is cured in a dreamscape sequence engineered by Matt Parkman; we get the usual stuff about psychosomatic injuries becoming real, and Matt's new girl attempts to save him, and then Arthur "Call me Q" Petrelli shows up. Angela reminds him that deep down inside he still loves her, so Arthur cures her.

Wow. OK, Angela, now remind him that his insane quest to destroy the world is also because you two have had a tiff and...Angela? Angela!! Crap. The show goes on.

So anyway, Ando has been saddled with a Hiro that believes himself to be ten years old (Thanks to Arthur "Magneto's a lass" Petrelli).

And then at the end of the episode, everyone picks sides. The teams are:

Team Arthur
Sylar
Flint Gordon, the big dumb lunk that hurls fire.
Mohinder
Ellie Bishop
Knox
Tracy Strauss

Team Angela
- just about everyone else.

Except Hiro and Ando. So far. They used to work for Arthur, but quit.

And then in the next episode, things get stranger. An Eclipse happens and suddenly everyone loses their powers. Oh noes! This provides one really decent scene, in which Matt Parkman refuses to believe he can win his girl back without his powers and Hiro pelts him with corncobs until he smartens up.

The other thing that happens here is Sylar changes sides roughly eighty-seven times. Is he playing a complex game of his own? Is he really this easy to manipulate? Is he just a mass of conflicted broodingness? I think he's up to something, and it's amusing to see him turn into a badass (with the line "I hate heroes") just before the eclipse happens - during which Noah, the man with the Horn Rimmed Glasses and real tough guy, dislocates Sylar's shoulder and makes the badass cry like a little girl.

Claire gets shot, Arthur "Omnipotent" Petrelli makes an elementary deductive mistake based on more prescient art, and the Petrelli boys end up on Haiti arguing with each other about who the bigger jerk is. Right now, lads, I would have someone Zombie you and be done with the pair of you.

Onward to

Fringe

The premise for this show is not simple.

FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is recruited to investigate odd events that seem to form part of something called The Pattern - which suggest that someone is performing experiments on the world using rather extreme fringe science.

Olivia is pretty good stuff, actually. She's sensible, rational, passionate and clever. She's played by Anna Torv.

Olivia's team consists of a Mad Scientist, Walter Bishop. Walter (played by John Noble) has been in a lunatic asylum for the last 17 years.

If you watch this show for now other reason, do watch it for John Noble's performance. He's fab. I love Walter Bishop, who can segue from bewildered non-sequiters to towering rage in moments, and who's dialog you have to pay close attention to. The rest of the cast are more or less forgetable (apart from Astrid Fenyman, the assistant, who is a background character that needs more lines and more of a part in the show).

The ideas presented are firmly in the X-Files territory, but instead of having a spooky explanation, everything here is rooted in Science. Although there are nods to things being Odd, like the rather well done Classic MiB who shows up in the epsiode The Arrival. This is no Will Smith MiB, this is one from the annals of the Mothman reports, and the early days of UFology, and it made me rejoice to see it.

I love the show. There, I said it, and recommend it to you.

Next?

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I wouldn't have watched this at all, but Summer Glau is in it.
Anyway.
It turns out to be pretty good.

Summer Glau, "River" from Firefly, is a Terminator programmed by John Connor to protect his younger self. The show talks about Emergent Behaviour - which is when a machine that is programmed to learn does something outside the normal range of what it should do - and then uses Cameron to demonstrate this.

There is a moment where Sarah Connor sees a tortoise on it's back. She turns it over. Later, Cameron asks John why she did this and John tells her that good humans like to help when they can, and that it would have been cruel to leave the tortoise to die. Shortly thereafter, Cameron beats the pogies out of a former FBI agent while John interrogates him. Once the beating is done, Cameron looks at the agent, who is on his back in the remains of a table, and turns him onto his front before walking away.

The show is full of little moments like this, and Summer Glau is very good at them. The rest of the cast are...more or less what you'd expect.

Lena Headey has the unenviable task of playing Sarah Connor; the character is basically nuts anyway, tortured by what she believes the future holds, and has forced herself to become a steely killer. This conflicts with what the character really wants to be, which is a mother to John. It's not an easy role, especially since Sarah Connor is what you get when a woman tries to be a man - or in this case, as we saw in Terminator 2, a Terminator.

Thomas Dekker plays John Connor, and it's another one of those difficult roles to carry off; the initials JC are not a coincidence. He's going to be mankind's last hope, but when we meet him he's fifteen and already has the attitude of a combat veteran. John's character is very much darker and more troubled than the John Connor we have seen in movies, but again this seems to work well.

Watching John and Sarah in conflict about how life is to be lived is interesting, and forms part of the show's emotional conflict. There are other characters, some from the future and some not, and an interesting sideline: Shirely Manson is apparently playing a T-1001, that happens to be running a company which looks like it might want to create Skynet.

It's worth picking an episode or two to watch, simply to work out whether the show's mix of sly commentary about the future and explosions is for you. Again, I like it enough to have caught up on Season 2, but I'm not quite sure if I like the show as a whole. I shall watch more.

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Thanksgiving

This is Thanksgiving weekend, a lovely American tradition in which they celebrate something and eat a lot.

In many respects, it's like Christmas - which it's a month before - but dedicated to family. This year, people all over America will be flying and driving to be with their relatives and to spend a couple of days doing what families do.

It's bittersweet for me, because it will be my last.

By this time next year I should be back in England, for good, and no longer a husband or stepfather. My wife of six years has decided that she can't put up with me being a depressive, and whatever else I am - typically, I don't know why I'm a crap human being - and doesn't want to be married to me any more. I cannot explain how this feels, so I won't. It's hard enough to blog it, because I'm normally a quiet, private person. Ideas are for sharing, pain is not.

The plan, then, is to do the whole divorce thing and move out. I will spend several months saving like mad, and then I will leave the country, return to the UK, find a city and live in it.

My family have not spoken to me since I came out here. This has been a source of pain for some time, and they are not likely to start talking to me any time soon. They do not like me, and to be perfectly honest I am no longer all that fond of them.

I have not picked a city. I like the looks of Leicester, and Newcastle, and perhaps Birmingham. I won't make a decision about this for a while, because I don't need to. I am not looking forward to starting again, from scratch, for the third time in ten years. But I will.

I am very good at beginnings, but time is ticking on. My father died aged 49 and I wonder if I will follow him; given that I am currently a conglomeration of bad habits - and that's infuriating because the ones I want (wine, women and song) are denied me (can't drink, don't want to turn into a drunk. no more women, thanks all the same. Couldn't carry a tune in a bucket) while the ones I have (depression, a tendency to eat when depressed, a tendency to smoke instead of eat) are getting worse.

And I cannot tell you how dull this all is. Look, I hate talking about myself because I'm boring. Instead:

Don't see The Brave One. If you want to watch a movie about a vigilante gunning people down for no reason other than that it seems like a good way to make sense of the world, go and rent Death Wish. Jodie Foster is excellent, and as a study of how someone turns to violence and revenge as a way to make sense of the world this is a good character study. But character studies do not make good movies unless there is a story to be told. Here, there isn't. You want to see this done well? Watch The Dark Knight instead.

Also don't see Click because it's just It's a Wonderful Life done with considerably less charm and warmth, or even life affirming qualities. It's an Adam Sandler vehicle telling that all too familiar tale of a man who can't do everything at once but desperately needs to because his life demands and pressures him into it, and his own role as breadwinner means he needs to provide for his family. And it's dull. There are some laughs, but they are too few and far between and the best of them are delivered by Christopher Walken.
Normally I wouldn't spoil a movie, but you don't need to see it - so, it Adam Sandler - who is playing himself as usual - fast forwards through his life using a magic "universal remote" and ends up losing his wife and kids (to Sean Astin in a red speedo) whilst becoming a success at his job. Of course, this leads to him also alienating his own parents, and missing all the fun times. At the end, on his deathbed (or death tarmac, possibly, since he kicks the bucket on a road while it's raining) he passes on one scrap of wisdom to his son and expires. Only to wake up back where he started, given another chance at life with a stern injunction from the Angel of Death to do it right this time.

I also saw Sweeny Todd, with Depp and Bonham Carter and Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen...assorted others. Victorian, gloomy, lingering shots down HBC's top for no readily apparent reason, and Johnny Depp. Since he's generally worth the price of admission on his own, I thought I might like this. I was right. Well, it's the movie version of a Sondheim musical and that's also good news. The gruesomeness is gruesome. The cast are pretty decent, although I am getting a bit weary of seeing the entire cast of Harry Potter trot before my eyes - don't we have any other actors in Britain? - and although I wasn't supposed to be uplifted or cheered by this gore splashed penny dreadful, I was. So there.

It also renewed my enthusiasm for owning a straight razor. I had one once and was almost able to shave myself properly without opening an artery. I would like to master that skill, so I might go look up something special for my tonsorial arrangements.

Meat pie, anyone?

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ZOMG! Cyberpunks!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7740483.stm

As the article says, the USA is under increasing threat from Chinese cyberspies.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the USA is proud of technology. And while it makes some really neat toys, neither government nor enterprise understand how to use and abuse them properly.

Second, because any human product is inherrantly flawed and an sufficiently dedicated hacker can get into just about anything given time and resources.

I say this not because I am some ub3rl33t h4x0r capable of "hacking the Gibson" or "hacking all the internets at once", but because I'm moderately I.T. aware and moderately paranoid. You build defenses expecting that some other bugger is working on ways to crack them.

In this case, if you want to secure information from cyberspies my immediate thought is "stop leaving it on vunerable networks". Print it, put it in a box, lock the box in a safe, lock the safe in a room, lock the room in a building, lock the building. This low tech solution is neither interactive nor sharing, but it will flat foot 100% of computer based hacking.

If information is sensitive, why is it being shared? If someone needs to see it, do not allow the information to go to them, make them come to the information. This is also simple, low tech, and irritatingly obvious.

In the same sense, if your government officials leave laptops full of sensitive data on the tube, take away the laptop, give the man a desktop bolted to his desk and don't let him work from home ever.

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Heroes Season 3 - yet again

The story continues by going backwards and filling in some backstory about the current situation.

Everything takes place during Hiro's visionquest and we assume we are viewing the true facts of the events depicted. We've rolled back two years, watching the early events of the first season, knowing what we now know about the Petrellis, the guy with the Horn Rim Glasses, Sylar and the rest of the gang.

It's sort of an Origin story episode.

Over the last couple of weeks we have seen the Petrelli family a'fightin' and a feudin', so it was probably about time that we discovered why. Everything hinges around Arthur and Angela Petrelli, their plans to take over the world (or something) and their difference of opinion.

Arthur dominates his wife and family, literally messing with Angela's head any time she takes against him. He plans to kill Nathan, has Linderman attempt to do so, and is poisoned by Angela. We know he survives.

We also see Sylar attempt to kill himself, and be forced into becoming the relentless and unstoppable killer we came to know and love by HRG (who is busily manipulating things behind the scenes).

At least this week we get to spend relatively long periods of time with the characters. There's plenty of attention given to the Petrelli family, and in fact to the extended family given that we now know Sylar is in fact Gabriel Petrelli.

This should be a low key episode, and it more or less is. It's nice seeing Zachary Quinto turn Gabriel Gray into Sylar, it's also nice to see how much of a bastard Arthur Petrelli is.

Eric Roberts is in this too, as an Ageny for The Company, and Christopher Eccleston's character gets a mention.

And since this is all a vision quest, we're not overly concerned with Suresh turning into a monthter, or Peter turning into Sylar, or adding anything to the story at all. Until the last few seconds, when it all seems to go terribly pear shaped for Hiro.

Somehow, the threat to Hiro and the "origin" of Sylar are the most compelling threads of the whole episode. Gabriel Gray is a harmless enough guy who attempts to kill himself after he kills someone with an ability because he's unable to cope with his own feelings of guilt and remorse. This sort of makes sense, seems to be a good start point, feels right.

And it turns out that Clint, the guy in level 5 that can throw fire, is the brother of Meredith - Claire's biological mother.

- as an aside, will you please look at the amount of SOPE! in this storyline? If this was Doctor Who, people would be up in arms about the interrelationships of characters.

I, on the other hand, am sort of digging it.

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Good Books

I don't just watch TV and fret about politics.

The book I absorbed today was The Knight in Battle, a non-fiction work examining the changes in medieval warfare from the 1100s to the 1500s. The author, a titan of a chap called William Ewart Oakeshott, who alas died in 2002 before I could find him and thank him for being brilliant.

In the course of the book we get a looksee at Richard the Lionheart vs Saladin, the Battle of Lincoln Fayre (featuring the always awesome William Marshall) a glimpse of Bayard and the changes rise of the Swiss pikeman.

Oakeshott's scholarly abilities are never in doubt; his writing style is lively and engaging to the point of his works being collector's items for me. You never have a moment's doubt that he loves this subject completely, that he understands how to present it to the people who are new to the material and that he wants you to engage with it and learn more. In short, he's a joy to read.

For example, in describing the battle of Lincoln in 1217, Oakeshott throws us a quick appreciation of Bad Prince John - who was definitely bad, and yet also a really very competent soldier and strategist. If all you ever see of Prince John is the man being baffled by Robin Hood and standing in the shadow of Coeur De Lion, it's not surprising he gets a raw deal. Oakeshott drags him out of the shadows and lets us get a good look at the King who lost his country and then fought like a man possessed to keep it away from the French.

Oakeshott is deft, clever, witty and warm and any of his books are heartily recommended.

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Halloween Viewing

Every Halloween, my family has a tradition: junk food and scary movies.

This year, we gave Emily (our eldest) the job of picking out the movies we'd watch, because on the whole she has good taste in films.

The Happening was up first.

M Night. Shal..whatsisname rarely lets us down, and The Happening is a departure from his recognised formula; there is no discernible twist, so what we get is a straight story with characters and a situation. The Happening is a nice little ecological parable, with the Gaia Hypothesis at the core. What happens when the planet decides it's had enough of humanity?

The human story at the core is low key; a high school science teacher and his wife, who may be having relationship problems, are forced to care for a young child and attempt to survive a situation which pits them against human nature and Mother Nature.

The teacher, Eliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) are isolated from the herd of humanity by an ever decreasing circle of horror. Humans aren't a herd animal, but we are social creatures, and one of the things the movie exposes is the smallest common denominator of human society - the family. As the events of The Happening close in around the characters they are forced closer and closer together, finding strength in each other and growing to accept their feelings for one another.

In some senses, this is a cliche. Rarely do we see a Situation Movie where the estranged male and female leads don't come out of it with renewed bonds of love. In another sense, though, the movie shows us what we are at the core: a society of families, with the bonds that we choose to make being the most enduring and important to us as individuals. We also get a long, hard look at trust and friendship - again, choices that we make which are far more solid under pressure than we might initially believe.

The Happening is chilling in a very small scale way, and although the movie has been roundly panned by critics, professional and otherwise, it works. Wahlberg plays against type, his character isn't a hero and instead comes across as an intelligent and earnest man out of his depth. There are no heroics here, he doesn't save the day, the decisions he makes are small on the global scale but intensely personal and all the more interesting for that.

I enjoyed the movie, not because of the scare factor - Shyamalan uses the R rating to show grisly death after grisly death, although with a remarkble lack of gratuitous gore, using the horror to underline the hopeless nature of the crisis. It also works better because of the lack of twist. This defeat of expectation is probably why a lot of people felt let down, but that's a good thing: directors and movies should not be product.

The Strangers is torture porn. Although scary, tense and well constructed after watching the film I couldn't find a reason for it to exist.

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a couple who have just had one of those relationship mis-steps, where one person wants a deeper level of committment than the other, and don't know what to do in order to resolve this issue. Luckily for them, they are subjected to psychological and physical peril by a trio of roving psychopaths and this solves to resolve them both to love each other, shortly before being butchered.

And that's it. The scares are of the "boo!" variety, there is a load of creeping menace that is deftly and unnervingly put together which keeps you either on the edge of your seat or forces you to curl up in the back of it. All well and good, but the movie doesn't do anything else. It's entertainment of a form I am deeply uncomfortable with - for one thing, it's based on a true story and, at the very beginning, tells you that no one is quite sure of the events that took place that fateful night. Which tells me that our lead characters don't, in fact, make it out alive. With this knowledge in place, with almost no script and therefore no real character development possible, all we're left with is being helpless witnesses to an episode of insane brutality.

The one bright spark is Liv Tyler, who manages to create an emotional journey for her character and who stands out as the one reason to watch the movie at all. But not more than once.

Oh, and as noted above, the couple do come out of the situation with renewed ties and love. They just don't get to enjoy it.

The Mist is a Stephen King yarn, dealing with the ties that hold communities together when faced with things beyond their understanding. There are tentacles, a base under seige, religious mania and claustrophobia - a neat examination of modern America in the face of the War on Terror, in fact.

I will actually review it when I have watched it at not 2am, and when I can remember more than that initial paragraph. It should be noted, however, that the direction and acting are enough for me to want to see it again. Good movie.

Iron Man we got because Dad is a geek and on a superhero kick.

Yes, it's a popcorn movie and yes, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have created yet another flawed hero who is, nevertheless, a hero. It's a tale about responsibility, power and really neat technology and it has everything I wanted from an Iron Man movie. Robert Downey Jr. was a perfect choice for Tony Stark; I think Hollywood has caught on to the big point about superhero flicks, that beneath the fights and the cool stuff these are stories about people and their choices. We've seen it in The Dark Knight and we see it again in Iron Man, but in both situations it;s not as forced or rammed down our necks as it has been in the Spider Man sequels: with great power comes great responsibility. Shouldering that responsibility is the mark of a hero, at least according to Marvel.

It works.

If you aren't interested in that, RDJ and the movie deliver on absolutely every other score. The action is pacey and suitably huge. The technology is cool, and it's fun that Stark has a better relationship with his household robots than he does with the people around him. Watching him attempt to break out of this situation is as entertaining as the CGI antics of the suit of armour.

My one gripe is that the trailer used "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath for Tony's breakout from his terrorist captors - which was a 'punch the air' moment, but the movie leaves this music for the end titles. A shame, it worked better in the trailer.

An excellent blockbuster, with loads of room for sequels and extrapolations, and RDJ is apparently on the Tony Stark gravy train for at least another three films, which makes me happy because he has the character down to a tee and is extremely watchable.

And that'll do for now.

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The Next Doctor

So, in 2010 we get a new Doctor. Well, the tail end of 2009 really.

Much is being made, in fandom, of who the next chap will be. Some interesting names are being kicked around, including a couple of black actors, and some parts of fandom are not entirely happy with that possibility.

Being charitable, I'd say they've fallen into the trap of "tradition" (a thing that is done because we've forgotten the reasons for doing it that way in the first place). The Doctor has always been a white guy, therefore he should continue being a white guy.

Which isn't really much of an argument.

My point of view is that the role should go to someone who is going to get the most out of it as an actor, someone who will hopefully stick with it for more than one season and someone who will be entertaining. The final choice of actor doesn't matter to me outside these criteria.

I'd like to see David Tennant's replacement last longer than a season simply because The Doctor is important to people. Give the actor a chance to get into the role, to become "my Doctor" for another set of fans, to do something interesting with the part. That's going to take more than one season.

Plus, I'm a fan. I like a bit of longevity in my Doctors. From the little I've seen of Patrick Troughton, I find myself wishing he'd done another year (if only to ensure that more of his tenure survived the great episode cull), but that's just a side effect of me really enjoying his performance and wanting more. I think David Tennant, like Patrick Troughton, has a shrewd eye on his career and has made the right decision for himself and his future - and I can hardly blame him for that, especially given all the fun he's provided over the last few years.

If you really want to speculate, you can probably narrow down the range given the comments made by the cast and crew over the last couple of years, but beyond that I don't really want to investigate too deeply.

Because for me, there's still something magic about regeneration. In a way, I'm hoping they keep this a secret until we actually see the regeneration around Christmas 2009. I'm looking forward to being surprised, and slightly wrong footed, by the choice. Looking at regenerations past -

- actually, one of my first memories of the show is watching the Pertwee/Baker regeneration scene and being curious, a little surprised, and a bit upset that the Doctor was changing. I was equally emotional over the change from Tom Baker to Peter Davison, and once again when Davison became Colin Baker. I was utterly nonplussed at the choice of Sylvester McCoy but by the time he changed into Paul McGann I didn't want him to go either. All the way through my time with the show, I've been enthralled and saddened when one actor bows out and another takes his place.

That magic remains.

In the end, it doesn't matter who plays the Doctor and in all honesty skin colour is probably the single least important aspect of the person who steps into the role next. Time and again, we've been shown that the writing, the ability of the actor and the dedication of the production team are what make the show captivating. As long as the folks in charge of the casting process are aware of this, I feel that they'll make the best decision for the show as an entity. If they want to do something non-traditional, I'm more than happy with that. Things that don't evolve tend to stagnate and a stagnant Doctor Who isn't good for anyone.

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General Roundup

The Current Book: Snowcrash

Again. To be honest, I am a sucker for cyberpunk and virtuality but even more of a sucker for the core of the book- the concept of language as a virus. One thing that always grips me is a book with a powerful idea at the core, which is why I spent so much time with Hard SF and why books like Snowcrash keep me coming back to see if there are any bits that I have missed.

I also read The Government Manual for New Superheroes which has been sitting on a shelf feeling unloved. I went through a phase of collecting small and not very serious books like that a while ago and, given the rather obvious nature of the book itself, it raises the odd smile here and there.

The Current Tunes: A Tribute to Chairman Humph

A Radio 4 tribute to Humphrey Littleton, one of those people who's contribution to life you really don't assess until they're gone. The tribute, narrated by Stephen Fry and with contributions from the likes of Barry Cryer, Jack Dee, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor et al, painted a vivid picture of Chairman Humph as a person and as a gentleman. Most telling of all, an anecdote about the man himself on VE day, being wheeled around London in a cart and playing his trumpet. Amazingly, a BBC recording of a commentator overlooking the scene at the gates of Buckingham Palace captures Humph playing the trumpet. In amongst the crowd noise and under the terribly serious tones of a BBC voice long gone, you can make out the sound of "Roll Out the Barrell" and of a crowd singing along.

The Current TV: No Heroics

Since I seem to be on a superhero kick, I thought I'd do a little digging and see what all the fuss is about.
I must be getting old.
The amount of profanity nearly put me off, until I tuned it out. It's...crude, sometimes funny, with large chunks of pathos and some genuinely amusing moments; superheroes can't get their lives together either, it seems, and are as ill-adjusted and uncomfortable as the rest of us.

I knew this.

Well, when you grow up reading reprints of Marvel comics (and Spiderman in particular) the concept that a superhero is all coolness when the mask is on and yet as tenative and insecure as real people in day to day life is simply not news. For the rest of the population who are currently superhero aware thanks to the likes of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and who have no real investment in the genre, it's probably funnier.

Mind you, there was this anthology...a while back...with contributions from people like Gaiman and David Langford, called Temps. I feel sure that the writers of No Heroics are familiar with it.

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Heroes, Season 3, again

At last, Heroes seems to be attempting to tie things together into one coherent plot and with a bit of luck that will make for some interaction between the various characters and stories.

They are still doing the "and now, twenty seconds with Suresh! Followed by eight seconds of Sylar!" thing, which is still getting on my nerves. I would love to spend more time in the company of Hiro, or any of the characters really, because as it stands the nature of the show means I really don't know most of the characters. Developing powers have replaced developing characters.

For example, Nathan Petrelli (the flying politico) started out the season convinced, utterly, that his power was a gift from God. That idea has been rather brusquely discarded, in favour of a more scientific explanation and Nathan's character has likewise reverted. What if, even faced with the truth about the source of his power, he continues to believe? As it stands, Nathan Petrelli seems to have shaken off his brush with God in short order; to me this says that he was never that convinced about it in the first place, so can I trust anything about this person? Who is he, really?

The story, such as it is, now appears to revolve around the Petrelli family and an internal feud between mother and father, tugging the kids (Nathan, Peter and Sylar) in different directions. The good news is there are indications that Sylar, now recruited by his Dad, isn't playing the same game as everyone else; the analogy is that while Mr and Mrs Petrelli are playing chess with the assorted characters, Sylar is now playing Poker and has been smart enough to mark the cards without telling anyone.

Peter Petrelli has been a bit of a headless chicken since the start of the season and is still hyperventillating his way through scenes. I feel that if he would just stop for a moment and catch his breath, and perhaps do some actual thinking, he might be a bit more interesting and a lot more useful. As it is, he lurches from one crisis to the next without ever really having a plan. This is all good stuff if you want your hero to be a reactionary mess, complete with knee-jerk responses that seem to come out of nowhere, but less good if you're hoping he might be a character you identify with and want to see succeed. He's outplayed and outclassed by everyone else, never seems to catch a break and instead of being the audience identification character is more a sort of mobile punchbag.

Is it good, though?

Well...yes, sort of. I do hope they wrap this story up, though, because I'm not sure it's good enough for a Season 4.

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Superheroes come to feast...

Superheroes are being gleefully strip-mined by Hollywood and just about everyone else.

Adrien Veidt would point out that in times of economic hardship, we turn to symbols of strength and solidity as well as escapism for entertainment. After the glut of Reality shows, perhaps we as consumers are ready for things to be more fantastic and less about the humdrum?

It helps that Hollywood seems to have picked some decent projects and seems to want to take them seriously - at least for a given value of "serious". A case in point, "The Dark Knight", which has the advantage of being about normal humans. Strip away the Batman stuff and you have a good, soild, mob thriller. Get rid of Batman and the Joker, and the idea of the movie playing out with Harvey, Rachel and Jim Gordon in the spotlight still works. Nolan's use of real locations gives the movie a grounding in reality that Burton's Gotham didn't have, and I'm pretty sure that Gotham was always based on an uneasy amalgam of New York and Chicago anyway.

Adding Batman and the Joker gives the movie another layer, pushes it into interesting and mythic territory. And let's be honest, the ongoing twisted romance between the Joker and Batman is the one relationship in the film - and the one relationship in the comics - that the fans really care about. I was pleased that Nolan allowed the Joker to say it in such loving terms, turning the idea of being completed by another person firmly on it's head. Bruce Wayne wants to be completed by Rachel, sees her as his safe haven, his Penelope.

The moment we know that Rachel is what Bruce is looking forward to is the moment we should realise that she's doomed. It's almost a war movie cliche - the war weary soldier drawing strength from the knowledge that the girl he left behind is still waiting for him.

Coming up, of course, is the Other Great Graphic Novel: Watchmen.

It's going to make an interesting movie. The characters, in their graphic novel form, are not the superheroes we're used to seeing. Batman might be an extremist, but he still has rules and he's still recognisably human. Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, even The Comedian and Ozymandias are already a long way away from that state when the story begins. The other characters are even less of the heroic norm, which makes me wonder whether the movie will use Dan Dreiberg as the audience identification character.

Frankly, if there are still people out there who think Rorschach has an identifiable point of view, I don't want to know. Even the happy nihilism of the Comedian is uncomfortable.

This might be why it's taken so long to get the movie made. Not all of the issues in turning that book into a motion picture are to do with the technology and the technique. Alan Moore created a dense, literate, intelligent story that should more or less defy translation and, like a lot of "the movie of the book" situations some of it certainly will.

Perhaps the way to think about this is to look back at Stallone's "Judge Dredd". Without judging the man too harshly, one of his reported comments was that he didn't understand where the humour was in the script, felt that a comic book of that nature ought to be more broadly funny, which might explain why the movie captured some of the look but none of the edge. What didn't translate was the idea that you shouldn't like Dredd, that Dredd was, in fact, the embodiment of everything that is wrong with MegaCity One, and that he's a cold, mudering bastard.

That people liked him for it is perhaps a bit of a tragedy, or just shows that what Pratchett said about humans getting carried away by any new idea which includes a uniform and a slogan is true.

Dredd, Rorschach, the Comedian, Batman, the Joker...they all have something in common.
They believe. Utterly and completely, they believe in something. It can be hard to disagree with their point of view when it's presented in such a stark fashion, and there is something about that steely belief which lends them a charisma that they shouldn't have, or at least bends our will far enough out of shape that we begin to find their dissonant views harmonising with ours. Yeah, criminals. They probably deserve a kicking. Or shooting. Yeah, torture. Justified, as long as we're only doing it to bad people, and only to get information to prevent worse crimes. Yeah.

So perhaps the current infatuation with Superheroes is more of a reflection of the times than we thought?

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Heroes, Season 3

I have to admit, I want to like Heroes simply because it's a show about superheroes and, for at least a season, seemed to be doing it properly.

I think it probably says a great deal that my favourite comic books were V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns et al - fundamentally, stories about someone very unusual in a fairly ordinary world.

Heroes had that going for it, but as the population of people with powers multiplies you run into the issue of spending too little time with the characters that matter.

For example, Season three now has storylines running about Suresh, Hiro and Ando, Matt Parkman and a new female character that Hiro believes is his nemesis, about three escapeess from Level 5, HRG, the Petrelli brothers, Sylar, Mama Petrelli, Claire's adoptive mother, Claire's biological mother, another prescient painter (and Matt, and Hiro), the character played by Malcolm MacDowell, whom I have probably spelled all wrong, and a bunch of other stuff that I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around let alone caring about.

The individual stories are interesting - Sylar appears to be on a redemption arc, which could be an exceptional story, and Peter has learned Sylar's ability so now he also shares Sylar's twisted hunger. This, in itself, is cool. At last, we get to see something of what it must be like to be Sylar, but from inside the head of someone we already know. How will Sylar's demonic need to feed affect Peter? Well...

...it gets him put in a medical coma while we trot off to find out what the other eleventy plot threads are doing. This is infuriating.

Likewise, the early promise of Hiro and Ando's tale - which stems from one of those "the character has to be a moron for the next five minutes in order for this to work" situations - is on rough ground because so little time is spent with them. If you missed it, basically a time travelling Hiro sees his own apparent death at the hands of Ando. This is a wonderful idea, because the two had been inseperable and worked well together. Instead of drawing this out, teasing the breakdown in their friendship or leading us down the path that leads to either Hiro going bad and Ando taking him out, or Ando going bad, it seems to have been taken care of in about three episodes.

Damn!

There was even room for a twist there, which might have already been foreshadowed.

So, having gone from something approaching Marvel's "New Universe" experiment, we're almost in X-Men territory where everyone appears to have some superpower and no one therefore appears all that special or interesting.

It could be better. It should be better. I watch the online reruns instead of kicking the kids off the sofa and making it Monday night viewing, which should in itself be telling.

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Political Gubbins

Not that I have an axe to grind or anything...

One of the allegedly key issues in the local Arizona elections this year is that perenial favourite Gay Marriage. There's quite a lot of nonsense being spouted about marriage being defined as "between a man and a woman".

I think that turns up in the Bible, which isn't part of the US Constitution, no matter how hard some people believe it should be.

There's a human cost to this, and I wanted to mention it in passing. I can't use real names, naturally.

Ms Smith and Ms Jones have a problem. Ms Smith is a world class scientist, a real asset to her company and a genuinely nice person. She loves Ms. Jones, and would like to spend the rest of her life with her. Ms. Smith was born in another country. Ms. Jones is a US Citizen. If they could marry, the LIFE act would keep them together and ease Ms. Smith's immigration paperwork. However, since they are both women they can't be anything more than domestic partners. I can chunter on about this, but here's what it comes down to - neither lady has hidden their gender preference, their families are good with it, their friends are good with it, but now Ms. Jones is being forced to make a tough decision: when Ms. Smith's visa runs out, she has to depart the USA and Go Home. Ms. Jones can attempt to go with her, but there is no guarantee of the immgration process to Ms. Smith's country being kind or enlightened.

These two people love each other.
If one were a man and the other a woman, there wouldn't be an issue.
There wouldn't be an issue even if they didn't love each other. One quick civil ceremony and Ms. Smith could fade into the background*.
The likelyhood is that they will be spilt up and may find it very, very difficult to maintain their relationship.

This isn't a question of "devaluing marriage" - and let's be honest, with the divorce rate at over 50%, those of us who can marry are already doing a brilliant job of destroying the sanctity of marriage - and it's not a question of sneaking immigrants in who have no skills and who want to sponge off Welfare. It's a question of being fair, and it's a question of seeing marriage for what it is: a union between two adults who want to make a lifetime committment to one another.

Anything else is just silly.






*True story: I was driving back to Phoenix from Tombstone. We had to pass through a Border Patrol checkpoint. The car in front of us contained two people we knew - one gentleman of Latino extraction, born and raised in Cali. The other, an Essex lad on an expired visa. The one the border patrol asked for ID was not the pale and nervous Essex lad. It is not the first time I have seen that happen, either.

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