TV Review — V

I was crazy for the original V mini-series, and V: The Final Battle (the sequel mini-series), and V: The Series (the 1984 TV series).  (Never bought the comics, though.)  Diana was a bitch goddess, Crystal Carrington for the truly man-eater set.  And the fact that I still remember the half-alien girl’s word for peace — “pretanama” (spelling per Wikiquote) — says the show stuck with me in deep ways.

I want to like the new V show.  Really I do.  Oh God, but I can’t quite manage it.

The reinvention is adequate, carrying forward many of the tropes of the original show — lizard aliens disguised as humans coming to Earth allegedly in peace but really with an ulterior motive, human teenager falls for a Visitor, 5th Column rebels with Visitor allies on the inside, TV newscaster blows off ethics to get the inside track on Visitor news, and so on.  And they’ve ditched the Nazi subtext, replacing it with domestic terrorism.  (On the other hand, they also dropped the squick-inducing eating of mice, which was way cool in the early 1980s.)

I have a natural soft spot in my heart for Agent Erica Evans, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, such that I always think of her as Juliet (from Lost), and the actress carries some of the underscores of that character into this role.  (I keep helfway wishing agents Mark Benford or Dale Cooper would show up, though!)  And there’s a weird attraction to Scott Wolf as newscaster Chad Decker, since he is visually reminiscent of Michael J. Fox, who played a newscaster covering an alien invasion in Mars Attacks!

Some of the acting is top drawer, especially most any scene with Mitchell.  (I really liked the eye movements she made in a scene at the FBI office when they are watching a press conference on TV and she knows it’s all a lie.)  And Morena Baccarin as Anna is just so slimy, she just about reaches Diana heights (Anna, Di-ana, mmm).  I am also intrigued by Christopher Shyer as Marcus.

(Although speaking of eye movements: can we skip the edge-of-romance meaningful looks between Father Jack and Erica.  Priests shouldn’t be on the make.  Eeewww.)

I get unnerved by the cinematography on the Visitor ship, which uses green/blue screen backdrops constantly, but almost all of them slightly skewed or with wrong perspective.  Is it shoddy work or is it intentional to emphasize the alienness?  I can’t be sure.  (But if I question it, that means that the effect has broken me out of the story and thus the question is answered: even if it is intentional, the result is shoddy work.)

But the real problem I have is that just about every episode has me all but screaming at the screen: “That makes no sense!  How can you be that stupid!  Why doesn’t anybody say something?”

• Father Jack confides in Chad Decker, who trots to Anna and then comes back and tells Father Jack that he did so.  But Father Jack keeps talking with him, further jeopardizing their 5th Column cell with every syllable.
• They blow up a shuttle and find human remains in it.  But no one asks why there are absolutely no Visitor remains as well.  (Viewers know Visitors can be immolated, turned to ash, but the FBI and the media don’t know that.)
• They blow up a shuttle, leaving debris scattered over a big field.  High-tech debris.  And the Visitors let the human police and FBI do the clean up, giving them access to Visitor tech.  (Viewers know the shuttle was a set-up by Anna, and thus might have been stripped of anything useful, but the FBI and the media don’t know that.)
• Hobbes is framed for the attack on Lisa and has his picture shown on the news.  But he still goes out to meet a contact in a public park: no hat, no sunglasses, no shaved beard, no hair cut, no bleached hair.  Why did the FBI have to search for this idiot for years?  (I suppose you could argue that Erica’s partner, who was a Visitor, was blocking efforts to catch him all that time to allow him to be used as a patsy later on, but come on.)
• And then there he is again in public in a church.  And not just that, but with Father Jack giving an anti-Visitor sermon that makes people angry enough to get up and walk out, right past the guy whose face was plastered all over the TV a couple days before because he tried to kill the daughter of the alien woman they are almost revering as a god.
• And Hobbes also sits right next to Erica: the terrorist the FBI has been hunting for for years, sitting next to the FBI agent heading up the task force to catch him?  WTF?
• Lisa’s face is slashed and her legs are broken.  Her legs get healed at the medical center at the start of the next episode (so the shock value of her mother having her legs broken is completely wasted).  But if they could heal her legs, why doesn’t anyone interrupt the press conference and ask why her face hadn’t been healed?  (Yes, Anna intentionally left it unhealed for the press conference shock value, but the press conference was held outside the medical center, and no one thought to ask about the facial injuries?  Does Anna really think she is fooling any humans about her having ulterior motives?)
• All the ships arrived at once at the beginning, but when Anna decides to leave, she has only one ship pull out rather than all of them.  Shouldn’t this be a rather obvious ploy to anyone in government circles?  To be sure, the blogosphere would be pouncing on it.
• Joshua calls while they are interrogating the human prisoner.  So do they leave the room to answer the call?  No, they pull out the special tech gadget and talk right in front of the guy.
• After putting an axe in the chest of the Visitor soldier who nearly killed them all, Hobbes — the experienced terrorist/soldier — leaves the guy struggling to get up.  What, you thought he would just die in a few minutes?  Shoot him in the head and be sure!
• Anna’s people know there are 5th Column rebels in their own ships, so why aren’t they constantly scanning for unauthorized communication activities, which Joshua does just walking down the hall?  We saw the intense monitoring of humans being down via the jacket cameras early on, so is it even conceivable that similar monitoring throughout the V ships doesn’t also occur?
• Speaking of unauthorized communication, Erica is constantly on her cell phone at the FBI office.  Surely all communications in those offices are super-sensitive and need to go through secure channels.  And God forbid that she turn away from the office windows through which someone could read her lips.
• Further on this topic, what is with allowing humans to walk around the V ship unescorted, going wherever they want?  (And Erica with a gun, to boot!)  Worst example of this being Joshua directing Chad to a “restricted” corridor.  Restricted to whom, given that a random human was able to walk right in with no escort, passcard, or security challenge?
• What the fuck is Anna’s plan?  In the original mini-series, we started to have an idea after an hour, but by the end of 13 episodes — the entire first season — we have no idea if she’s sucking the planet’s resources dry, eating the people, running from worse invaders, or what.

These things drive me up the wall, and not in the sense of “What does it mean?  I’ll have to keep watching!” from Lost.

I see the show has been renewed for a second 13-episode season.  Jesus Christ, please fix these fucked up plot holes!  (Yeah, I’m praying to Jesus to do it since I don’t think the writers will.)
 

Further Thoughts on the iPad

By now, everyone and his brother has weighed in on the iPad.  Having been abvle to see and use one for a couple minutes, a few observations of my own come to mind:

It’s Apple, Stupid!

For all those people who complain about what the iPad doesn’t have:

• Multi-tasking: the iPhone doesn’t have it yet, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A memory card slot: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A removable battery: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A standard USB port: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• Get the picture?

Do you get the picture?  No one who thought about the iPad in context of other Apple mobile offerings for more than 10 seconds would expect any of this hardware stuff, nor would they expect any of the software pieces to appear on the iPad without it appearing on the iPhone at the same time.

Apple works hard to try and maintain the illusion of consistency in their hardware offerings.  No matter how much you might wish for these things on a general purpose tablet device, they aren’t the Apple way.  Bitching that they are missing from the iPad means you’re either an idiot, or you don’t do anything but complain, or you have a beef with Apple itself and couldn’t say something good about the product anyway.

Think About the Market for a Moment

When he introduced the iPad, Steve Jobs positioned it in between the iPhone (very small, very mobile device) and the MacBook (device with some mobility but intended for keyboard and mouse-intensive operations).

Which means that when a reviewer complains that he wouldn’t replace his laptop with an iPad, he is missing the point.  The iPad is not intended as a laptop replacement (although with the keyboard dock and iWork software, it can do some laptop activities acceptably).  If it was intended to replace a laptop, it would not have been described as sitting “between” the smart phone and the laptop.

So instead of bitching about how it doesn’t do what you want from a laptop — and I agree, it might be okay for text editing, but not for coding and not for editing Photoshop documents — how about thinking about what (and whom) it would be good for?

While those of us who make our livings from computers usually need the horsepower and keyboard and mouse, a whole lot of people (the majority of computer users, frankly!) don’t.  They need (want) Facebook.  They need a music and video player.  They need a web browser.  They need e-mail.  For these people, the keyboard and mouse are things they tolerate, pieces of the computer system that they use because that’s what computers have for inputting information and navgiating.  But no one needs a mouse to click (touch) a play button.  No one needs a hardware keyboard to enter a URL that they already have a bookmark for, nor to enter their credit card number for an online purchase.  And so on.

These are the people — and more, the uses — that the iPad is intended for.  Not you (most likely).  Them.  Think about them, and what they need, and how they might use the device.

Welcome to the Future

Who came up with the concept for the iPad?  Well, it wasn’t Apple!

Many geeks will claim it was Star Trek.  After all, the flip-top cell phone is pretty much directly from their Communicator,  and they have also had the PADD (Personal Access Display Device; never actually referred to that in the show) going all the way back to the original show.  I would submit, though, that those were PalmPilot and stylus-based tablet computer inspirations, typically vertical business/military applications rather than general purpose consumer/media devices (although such would surely have existed as well).

In terms of something that we recognize completely as an iPad-class device, though, consider these panels from the Legion of Super-Heroes showing consumer devices intended for reading, writing, and media consumption, dating back to 1984:

Rokk Krinn using a device as a story book, with pre-loaded content.  From Legends of the DC Universe 80-Page Giant #2 (2000).	A space shuttle passenger reading from a device, almost exactly iPad size and shape.  Possible pre-loaded content, possibly dynamic.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #0 (1994).	R.J. Brande using a device as a sketchpad, with a stylus for pen-like actions.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #0 (1994).
Colossal Boy with a newspaper-reading device.  The new content is loaded dynamically.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v3 #1 (1984).

Missing from these images, unfortunately (because I didn’t have an appropriate issue handy to scan from; I’ll get one eventually), is a version from the late-80s/early-90s version of the Legion.  In these stories, the McCauley Omnicom was ubiquitous: everyone had one, and everyone used them, for everything from portable computing to PDA tasks to online diaries to media consumption, pretty much exactly what the iPad is destined to be used for (especially a couple generations down the lilne).  In particular, this Legion series often featured diary pages and the like as background material, presented as displayed on an Omnicom.  And thus not just did Legion reader see the character interacting with the devices, they were directly shown an example of the device in actual use.  Needless to say, Legion readers from that era see an iPad and know exactly what the expected uses of it should be.

Did the Legion actually create the concept?  Oh, gods no.  You can be sure that diligent research would probably turn up science fiction stories dating back to the 1930s which reference hand-held newspaper readers and the like.  But what the Legion (and Star Trek) did do was to clearly visualize both the form factor and the uses of both stylus-based PDAs and multi-touch tablets well in advance of actual devices being viable.

Will I Buy an iPad?

Almost certainly.  I’m planning to for my birthday in late August, which will give time for a software update or two to come out, new app concepts to some out, and hardware add-ons to be released (such as the mysteriously absent video conferencing webcam).

You see, I travel quite a bit for pleasure or what I call “professional obligation” — not career-related trips, but ones where I have duties such a teaching dance workshops or being an organizational delegate.  On these trips, I want to stay connected to my e-mail and the web and social networking sites, and I want to consume media like music and video.  If I had the capability available, I would edit web pages and do graphic design work, but those are a tiny fraction of what I use a computer for while travelling.  (I did once create an event poster wholesale on a plane trip, but that was an exception.)

I used to have a Mac laptop I could use for this, both one from work (in a past job) and one of my own.  The latter one, I gave to my ex when we split, so that he would have a computer.  Lugging the laptop around was significant added weight on trips: laptop, charger, mouse (because I despise use trackpads for more than a couple minutes), and assorted cables.

After that, looking for other, lighter/better solutions, I bought a Nokia N800.  It was a nifty little device, but I found that I needed an external keyboard to use it efficiently, and the screen was just too small for most of my needs.  I could use it, but it wasn’t especially great.

I then bought an Asus Aspire One netbook.  Now I was back in laptop domain, with a large enough screen and a keyboard and such to run a browser and an e-mail program.  On the other hand, it is a Linux box, and you have to use arcane UNIX-style terminal commands to install any software at all.  I found some sites with step-by-step details to get me running Firefox and Thunderbird instead of the default apps, but I haven’t taken the time to relearn UNIX commands enough to generalize those steps to add other apps.  And I have had to completely reinstall the OS at least twice, meaning I’ve had to go back (find online again) through all those steps again and again.  It has all the joys of a hacker device, which is to say all sorts of pain for someone who just wants to be online and consuming media!

I’ve also got an iPhone.  This has the advantages of being an Apple device and thus both synching very well with my main system and having software which is familiar in how it works.  Make no mistake: these are massive plusses.  My e-mails, my calendars, my contacts: they are just there on both systems.  The screen isn’t very large, of course, and there’s no opportunity to do web page editing, document editing, or graphic design, and of course the lack of multi-tasking restricts some switching between mail and web, but the convenience of being able to do things like check my e-mail when in line at the grocery store are major things that just weren’t possible before with other devices.

So where will the iPad be viable for me?  Why, just where Steve Jobs said it would be.  I probably won’t use it waiting in line at the store, or to “Bump” my contacts to someone at the bar.  And I won’t use it to design an event poster.  But when I’m in a static location — the couch, the kitchen table, the hotel room or airplane seat — I’ll now be able to read mail and browse the web and watch video without needing to deal with a keyboard or needing to sit at my work desk, and without needing to squint at a tiny screen.  Basically, all the things that I can sort of do on the iPhone (or the N800), I can now do more effectively, and with a system I can manipulate in a familiar, comfortable, and easy manner (without the hardware getting in the way).  For 95% of what I need to do when I’m not at my work desk, the iPad will be a superb option.

(And you know, I probably won’t ever we able to do native Photoshop file edits like I can on a desktop keyboard/mouse system, but I’ll bet we’ll see WYSIWYG web page editing system that I can use for some of those tasks in a matter of months.)
 

Movie Review — Armageddon

I watched Armageddon last week, the 1999 sci-fi flick about an asteroid the size of Texas bent on crashing into Earth (and killing us all), with the solution being to recruit and quick-train deep core oil drillers as astronauts to drill a hole in the asteroid and drop a nuke in to blow it up.

Okay, admittedly seeing the the names Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay on a movie’s credits list should trigger the brain into saying “This is going to be lots of stuff exploding and levels of ridiculousness three times what anyone should be expected to endure, so just shut yourself off now.”

But I can’t do that!

Thoughts (and spoilers for every bit of the film!):

• I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where the high concept was quite so easy to distill: “Roughnecks in space.”
• If you send up two shuttles, one will crash.  That’s a given.
• The music (and some of the visuals) in this around the astronaut departure and return was some of the most patriotically manipulative I’ve encountered, to the point that it was almost a parody of itself.  (And let me note that by “encountered”, I mean “noticed” — so over the top that it broke me out of the film to analyze what they were trying to do.  The first film I noticed this with, and still my marker for egregiousness in that department, was A.I.)
• Why did they even bother having a woman astronaut in the crew if they were going to leave her in the shuttle the entire time?  The only thing she really got to do was to get tossed against the wall when the Russian cosmonaut wanted to hit the equipment with a pipe to make it work.
• After the (surviving) shuttle overshot its landing by 20-plus miles, it still basically crash landed, since the terrain wasn’t what they had planned on.  So how did it manage to take off again without any issues at all before the bomb blew up?
• Why do they have to put stupid countdown deadlines into these things?  All that does is tell us “Don’t get your hopes up.  The bomb won’t and can’t go off until the last few seconds.”  Here they had 18 days, and they still set it off in the last half second.
• What was so special about the drilling depth of 800 feet?  The asteroid was a million miles away when they detected it, and they could only barely analyze details on it anyway.  So why did the hole have to be 800 feet and not 775 (in which case they could have set the bomb off a good 30 seconds earlier)?  And why was 800 feet still the right depth when they were drilling in a completely different location than planned, in totally different material?  (I suppose this can be rationalized as the roughnecks and the shuttle crew didn’t have enough knowledge of the situation to ask the question, and even if the crew in Houston could have revised their estimates in time, would it have made a difference?  At that point, it was “Drill the hole, dump the bomb, and just pray like crazy.”)
• With radio and video transmission cutting in and out, it was amazingly clear for a good minute or more for Harry to say his goodbyes.  (There should also be a several second delay in transmission times due to the distances.  For dramatic purposes, we can excuse that some and they actually left things hazy enough to not make me complain about it too much.  It would have been a wasted plot point to make a big deal of it.)
• On the other hand, an extended period of clear video signal sure wipes out the tension from earlier regarding their absolute last chance to remotely detonate the bomb.
• The repeated scenes of small town America with people costumed right out of a 1950s farm really bothered me.  No one dressed like that in 1998.  See my earlier comment about the music being manipulatively patriotic.
• The surface of the asteroid was covered by razor sharp spikes of rock.  People were flying all over the place, crashing into the terrain.  Rocks were exploding, creating showers of even smaller razor sharp rock fragments.  And not a single spacesuit got even a tiny puncture.  (One guy did from his helmet being smashed to bits, but that’s not quite the same thing.)
• Given that the shuttle that didn’t crash overshot by 20-plus miles, how didn’t the second armadillo even find them?

And wasn’t that ending amazing?  At the very last second, the bomb that was dropped in the hole drilled in the wrong place on the asteroid tumbling end over end in all three dimensions (which had ruined their earlier calculations) blew the asteroid in exactly two pieces, sending both of them to pass Earth on opposite sides of the planet (“Missed it by that much!”), and the explosion also vaporized all the other rubble, including the basketball, Volkswagen, and presumably Chrysler Building-sized chunks which were in the rubble cloud stretching hundreds of thousands of miles ahead of and behind the asteroid (which had already destroyed much of New York and Shanghai, and all of Paris), so nothing more hit Earth at all.  What are the odds?

Let me tell you, as a math/comp sci major in college who started as a physics major, the odds are… (calculate) um… (check again) er… (grimace) zero.

Even if we close our eyes to the largest chunk (ahem) of this, that the asteroid itself was exploded enough for the major pieces to miss Earth and avoid the“global killer” nature, the fact remains that huge chunks of stuff were hitting the planet for three weeks before the big one arrived, and had already killed millions.  We saw massive amounts of smaller stuff preceding and following and all around the asteroid; if the shuttle didn’t blow up from the nuclear blast, then neither did anything further away than it, nor did many things closer than the shuttle that were larger.  There would be far more volume of that rubble than the leading bits that had already hit, given a reasonable normal distribution.  Even with the Texas-sized chunk missing, you’re still going to have one the size of Dallas (about 1/1000th the size of Texas) going boom into the mid-Pacific and creating a tsunami that wipes Tokyo, Sydney, and Los Angeles off the map.  You’re still going to have one the size of Crawford, Texas (1/1000th the size of Dallas) leaving a crater where Switzerland used to be.  You’re still going to have Lake Michigan vaporized by something the size of a semi.  You’re still going to have stuff the size of golfballs destroying the Hagia Sophia and the Taj Mahal (since they were both seen in the film).  And what’s more, you’ll have had this happening increasingly for a couple days before the bomb went off (the destruction of Paris was a good demonstration of this, but there would have been several more impacts of that size in the day or two before the bomb exploded) and you would have them coming for 3 weeks afterward, asteroid strike or not.

Global killer, with nothing more than bacteria surviving?  Averted.  Massive climate change that still lasts for a few hundred years?  Right on schedule.  Human population drops from 6 billion to 600 million (and that may be generous), with technology infrastructure and everything we know of as industrial-level civilization destroyed?  Check check check.

But I guess that sort of a slightly upbeat but ultimately depressing ending wouldn’t go over well, huh?
 

Movie Review — Avatar

We saw Avatar yesterday at the huge-screen Cinerama theater in Seattle.  Unfortunately, not in 3D; I missed that MovieFone lists the 3D version as a separate film, so I wasn’t aware that I was only looking at 2D entries.  (And in fact, one of the theaters showing it in 3D is apparently also showing it in 2D!  Talk about confusing!)

SOME SPOILERS BELOW

As everyone else in the world has said, the effects are fantastic.  I noticed one of the “helicopter” shots early in the film where I could tell it was CGI rather than real, but the rest of the film was pretty darn flawless in that regard (and I really tend to notice these things).  Some of the Na’vi characters were a bit stiff in their movements, but that was (a) mostly the avatars and (b) an alien race, so it falls easily in the realm of “Willing Suspension of Disbelief”.

I’m not sure whether I missed the 3D.  Since I wear glasses as it is, any additional eyewear is a bit troublesome anyway, and tends to fail at the peripheral vision edges.  As I recall from seeing Coraline last year, some aspects of the 3D process were more bothersome for me than useful as a result.  In particular, I had a couple nauseau bits with the overhead and falling camera shots seeing it just in 2D, which I think might have been worse in 3D.  But I could also tell that some of the “depth of field” shots — the landing helicopters, the Hallelujah Mountains, the flying dragons — probably would have been that much more “wow” with 3D.  I’ll probably have to see it again, in 3D, just to be sure.

The story?  Eh, yeah, you’ve heard the complaints.  It’s not that the story is weak, just that it’s standard, by the book: human (or white man) is assigned to research/spy on aliens (or natives), human falls in love with their lifestyle and the chief’s daughter, human fights back against his own kind’s intent to destroy the natives.  The first step on that plot trail leads inexorably to the last step.  With two possible endings: pure heart of the natives beats back the humans/white men, or technological superiority destroys the natives.  (The first is what happens in fictional stories, the second is what happens in historical dramas.)  But in the middle of watching the movie, you really don’t notice that too much.

Now that the Hometree is destroyed, the Na’vi clan will have to move elsewhere (although still close to the Tree of Souls).  Despite shipping the humans back offworld (which really means just back into orbit), there is absolutely nothing that’s going to prevent them from coming back down to mine the unobtanium.  It might take a while to get the needed confirmation from Corporate on whether to nuke it from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure) in revenge or to just go in again, but the odds of the Company just writing this whole thing off as a loss is remote.  Best option will be for Jake to work to broker a mining deal, but even then, we know those agreements are made to be broken, and other lesser deposits will be found and exploited, and there’s basically no way for the Na’vi to win this and not end up on reservations or outright exterminated.  As noted, the humans have nothing the Na’vi want, so there’s nothing that will prompt diplomacy and nothing to stop the eradication of the People.  (And the Company may want to exact specific revenge on their employee, Jake, for destroying Company equipment and absconding with Company property, his Avatar body.)

Speaking of dragons… I thought this after the travesty of Eragon and I really think this now: someone needs to be producing Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonriders of Pern” novels now!  The dragon effects are so ready for this.  It’s a two- or three-picture deal just waiting to be made, with the option of additional films out the back (the Harper Hall trilogy, Moreta’s Ride, Dragonsdawn,…).  I want to see Thread!  (Mind you, they absolutely have to use Michael Whelan’s dragon designs!  Those whirling eyes!)

Odd thoughts:

• The wolf-niche creatures reminded me a lot of the alleged chupacabras which have been filmed or killed recently.
• The idea that the Company in this is the same one as in the Alien films (especially Aliens, since that was also directed by James Cameron) gives rise to questioning whether Sigourney Weaver’s character here is related to the one in Alien.  It could work easily enough if you apply the cloning concept from the Heartbreakers comics — where one base person is cloned with genetic tweaks to create scientist clones, warrior clones, and so on.  (I recall that was even a continuity burp between the 3rd and 4th Aliens films which this could explain, something with Weaver’s character dying in one and being back in the next.  Never saw them myself.)
• The idea that the Hometree is so huge precisely because it is on top of the unobtanium deposit is never broached.
• A book?  They still print stuff on paper-like materials?  The amount of fuel required to transport that weight of paper is cost prohibitive.
• After making The Bond with the horse and the dragon and the tree, why didn’t we see those fiber-optic tentacles making the bond between Jake and his Na’vi princess?  Surely that would be the most intense intimacy possible.  (Oh god, I’ve just opened the door for gay Na’vi fanfic stories!)
• Wasn't Norman in the portable link station when the colonel started smashing it up to disconnect Jake?  He had forcibly come out of the link when his Avatar body was shot, but then what happened to him?  (I think we saw in in-Avatar again when the Company folks were being escorted off planet.)
• When Jake first got in his body and ran out of the medical bay, there were a dozen other Avatars with people linked into them.  What happened to them?  All loyal to the company?  All killed by the colonel?  All just conveniently forgotten?

---

Updated on December 29, 2009

Updated on February 26, 2010

After having seen a bunch of other movies on my February 2010 trip to New Zealand, I came back to thinking about Avatar’s story, combined with the Best Picture nomination the film has received.

Avatar does not deserve the Best Picture award.  While technically brilliant, the simplistic plot is a fatal flaw.  15 minutes into the film, you know exactly how the story will resolve: damaged man joins native tribe, man falls in love with native girl, man becomes the best native ever, man fights his own people to save the natives, natives win.  There is no particular subtlety and no notable deviation from the standard plotline.  The movie is on a bobsled track: unless it jumps the track (which then kills everyone involved — like nuking the entire planet), it&rsquos going to go right to the end, with the only question being how fast.  (I figured a luge reference there would be tacky.  Oops.)

In comparison, the other heavily animated film nominated for Best Picture — Up, pretty much designed for kids — has more layers to the plot and several possible endings, each with their own poignant value.  Avatar is a big FAIL in comparison.

Dream Journal: December 4, 2009

On December 4, I was scheduled to start the Landmark Forum, an event I didn’t really want to do.  (More on that in a later post.)  I had a brief dream the night before:

I was in a building with a high arched ceiling with glass skylights.  Sort of haphazardly placed around the large room were false walls, the sort that went halfway to the roof but not all the way.  Each wall had landscaping — ferns, moss, flowers, trickling fountains — and barely audible New Age music was playing.

It felt like a 1970s/1980s sci-fi show set, something from Logan’s Run or Buck Rogers.

I was talking to two guys who were also there for the Forum.  We all had on name tags and one had a black bar on his, an indicator of someone having taken the Forum before.  His name was “Belief”.  The other guy was named “Don”.  (I’m not sure if we were all wearing form-fitting jumpsuits or not.)

Some chimes rang, signalling that we to go in to the start of the Forum.  As we filed into some other room, Don and I noticed that Belief had vanished.  When we sat down, Don had also vanished.

Then I woke up.

Jeez, talk about your blatant and ugly symbology: that Landmark was New Agey and sci-fi, that any “Belief” would vanish from me, and that anyone (anything) else I knew would also vanish and I would be left alone.

The next night, my dream was Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” repeated over and over and over.
 

Ireland: The Ring of Kerry and the Gap of Dunloe (Wednesday, February 27)

Written Wednesday, February 27 at 7:19 pm, Killarney (upstairs at the cottage)

The weather was bright and warm today (it’s supposed to rain again tomorrow), so we drove the Ring of Kerry today.  We headed up to Kilorglin, then along the north edge of the Iveragh Peninsula, along the south side of Dingle Bay which had been so nasty a couple days ago but was now very calm.

The Ring of Kerry is quite definitely the big tourist road in the southwest region.  While much of the road is but two narrow lanes, it would still be navigable by a tour bus, which much of the Dingle and Beara peninsulas were not.  We only saw one tour bus all day, though (February is well outside the season); that probably made for a nicer trip, with far less traffic.  There were several patches of road construction along the way, including major work in Waterville and Castlecove; getting ready for the season, no doubt.

We stopped for ice cream in Castlecove (and I also bought a 2 CD set of Merle Haggard songs there), and then lunch in Kenmare, our third trip through that very nice little town.  We also shopped at the Kerry Wool Market shop there.  I bought a sweater and a ski cap; a bit expensive at €90 ($135), but they are wool and they will be my major souvenirs of the trip.  (I had also bought a €10 made-in-China-from-acrylic-yarn Ireland scarf in Dublin on Saturday.)

Rather than take the route back from Kenmare we’ve done twice, or back through the National Park, we went down into Black Valley and through the Gap of Dunloe.  Single-lane track the entire way (about 20 km), past sheep and farmhouses and looming upthrusts of rock; it was as close to a natural rollercoaster as you’ll find.  This time, I had the video camera with me and I recorded several snippets of driving on the dashboard of the car, including a full 8 minutes of harrowing drive through the Gap of Dunloe.  (I figure if I play it double time and add an Irish jig soundtrack, I’ve got the potential for a really cool and popular viral video on YouTube!  Remember that you saw it here first!)

We’ll be going into Killarney to the Danny Mann again shortly, so I can have my nightly Guinness and e-mail.  One of the bartenders is starting to recognize me!  (I was there until closing last night.)

After coming home from the pub each night, I’ve been watching DVDs I brought with me. So far finished Pretty Woman, watched Season 1 Episode 2 of Stargate: Atlantis, and two episodes of Season 1 of Will & Grace.  Maybe some Queer As Folk Season 4 tonight?

Finished Before Dishonor today.  Peter David is a great writer of Star Trek novels, tying disparate bits of continuity together into a superb whole, and doing it with dialogue that always seems note-perfect.  (He does Worf to a “T”.)  Although I’ve watched little Star Trek since the very start of Voyager, and thus haven’t seen either of the big Borg episodes referenced in this book, nor several of the lesser episode references — and didn’t know many of the secondary characters, at least one of whom is from an entire series of Star Trek novels that he has done — to see several of his creations from when he wrote the comics for DC Comics who are based on rec.arts.comics denizens from the time (late ’80s/early ’90s)show up here: Admiral Galloway and the TNG-era descendants of TOS-era security personnel Meyer and Boyajian make cameo appearances.)  And of course, when he made the pivotal reference to a Kirk-era TV show enemy, two words was all I needed to have a “Holy crap!” moment.  Connecting with your reader to do that with just two words, that’s good writing.

We’ll be going to Blarney Castle tomorrow — probably taking the north side of Inishcarra Reservoir and avoiding going into Cork at all — and then north to Mallow and back to Killarney.  Only about 10 miles is road we’ve been on before; much of should be pretty good road, except maybe the part along the reservoir.  It’s supposed to be rainy all day tomorrow, based on last night’s weather widget forecast.
 

Ireland: The Beara Peninsula (Tuesday, February 26)

Written Tuesday, February 26 at 6:20 pm, Killarney (upstairs in the cottage)

The weather was nicer today, and we headed to the Beara Peninsula, south of Killarney and Kenmare.  First we backtracked to Kenmare by the route we had taken back from there before, then drove the north side of Beara Peninsula along the Kenmare River as it widened out to the sea.

Unfortunately, I left my video camera at the cottage by accident, so no videos today.  Sigh.

The color of the waters were beautiful — green and a rich medium blue — and the landscape was fantastic, with limestone everywhere.  (And sheep, plenty of sheep.)  We stopped several times to view the water landscapes, plus at a ruined house that must have dated back 200 years and a similarly aged ruined church (Kilcatherine, I think) in the midst of gravestones, even with gravestones in the church itself.  There were a myriad of small featureless stones in amidst the ones from the past century which looked likely to be headstones from decades and maybe even centuries ago, when easily-weathering limestone is all that could be used.

A long portion of the road was again single lane, for several miles, although it never felt particularly dangerous due to there being sheep pastures and houses frequently along the way.

After a late lunch in Castletownbere, we went a little further out to the local castle, the ruins of Dunboy Castle (destroyed in 1602 because O’Sullivan Bere was in rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I) and the being-massively-renovated Puxley Castle (burned in 1920 by the IRA, now being restored into the Capella Dunboy Castle hotel).  The signage there answered one of our question about why people had settled out on the near-barren, windswept coasts: because the Normans forced them from their ancestral homelands and this was what was left.  The O’Sullivan clan had been forced to this area; we had seen that name abundant on gravestones earlier in the day.

We drove back on the south side of the peninsula to Glengarriff, and then over Caha Pass and through Turner’s Rock Tunnel, a series of one long and four small rough-hewn tunnels carved through the mountain rock.  We stopped briefly at the Bonane Heritage Park, where there were recreations of various Bronze Age-style sites, but we would have had to walk a 3 km uphill trail, so we stuck with just viewing a crannóog (hut in the middle of a pond) and a short hike up to a viewpoint to see the valley spread out below us.

Finished The Ringworld Throne last night, and as I expected, it didn’t have as good an ending as I wanted.  A big part was the character names; previous books had two or three Ringworld characters with odd names (Harloprillar, etc.), but this one had a dozen or more, making them difficult to track.  There were also large chunks of story in the last 50 pages which were either viewed by the characters rather than involving them directly, or which were related second-hand.  I got the feeling that Niven had more story than he could fit in, and ended up summarizing chunks to move things along instead of them maybe dragging.

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Updated on January 5, 2010
 

Ireland: Killarney (Sunday, February 24)

Written Monday, February 25 at 10:40 am, Killarney (at the kitchen table)

Went to the Internet café last night, late, for just 35 minutes.  Barely made a dent in my accumulated e-mail, but made sure the Rain Country folk knew I was alive, and replied to a couple work items.  Then went to the Danny Mann pub to use their wireless, and got through a bunch more e-mail.  Should have set up the e-mail program while there to just download all my e-mail, to take care of offline, but didn’t think to.  Tried to update QuickTime on the computer, but failed to get a good enough connection.  Looks like I need an XVid codec to view the videos I took on this computer, but the one out there for the Mac won’t run on a G3, so I’m out of luck; I can store them, but not view them except on the little Flip camera.  I’ll have to wait until I get home to do anything more with them.

We’re going north to Tralee and then out on the Dingle Peninsula, about another 120 miles of driving, it looks like.  No idea what the roads will be like, of course, and thus how fast the trip will be.  It’s also windy and rainy, so it may be a slow trip.

Looks like I’ll finally finish Larry Niven’s The Ringworld Throne today (I actually finished it on Tuesday).  I’ve only been working at it in spurts (when I travel) for a year and some.  Not as good as the previous two novels in the series; doubt I’ll get the fourth one.  I think the plot is scattered; the parts with the vampire slayers and the parts with Louis and Hindmost and company are only sort of intersecting, and there are too many pieces missing from the latter plotline for me to do more than stumble along.  Maybe everything will come together in the final 40-50 pages, but I’m not confident that it will be a satisfying conclusion.  And then I can get back to the second half of Peter David’s latest Star Trek novel, Before Dishonor, also lain fallow for a couple months.
 

Letter of Comment — Swarm Theory

I sent this letter to National Geographic regarding their July 2007 article on “Swarm Theory”:

I was very interested on the article on Swarms in the July 2007 issue of National Geographic.  I immediately thought of three places where swarm theory works for humans:

• Consider crossing a street: tasks include wait for the light, cross at a reasonable pace, don’t jostle others, and avoid colliding with those coming the other way.  Especially interesting is how the crowd shuffles about, deciding whether to break out before the light changes.
• Or at a concert where there are no assigned seats: sit close to the stage, sit close to the exit (or concessions, or the bathroom), sit with friends, sit far enough away from your neighbors.
• And on the dance floor: don’t collide with others, keep the beat, move in the right direction, keep the right pace.  (And for some, “have fun” and “innovate” are tasks that should be included.)

Also of interest, though understated in the article, is the idea that we can predict what the swarm will do.  Any individual may vary behavior or break out, but as a group, the actions are roughly predictable based on known inputs.  For fans of science fiction, this is the basis of Isaac Asimov’s “predict the future” science of psychohistory.  We’re still a long way from the stuff Asimov wrote about, but the first step is recognizing that in the big, big picture, masses of humanity aren’t any different from a swarm of ants or a herd of caribou.

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Update on December 18, 2009

The letter was not published in the magazine.