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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

'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.

Read more...

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?

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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?"

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...