I Am Who I Say I Am (and now I proved it)

It was a two and a half hour drive to Rexburg, Idaho, because that's where BYU Idaho is. Why they put it there, I can't say. I guess they liked it better that way. I went there to take a one hour test, to prove that I speak Hungarian, the first language I learned to speak. Needless to say, the test was about as easy as being asked to point to an apple in a bushel of apples when someone is holding my hand and I'm already kind of poking one finger out.

As I was sitting there, one of the kids I was taking the test with said BYU in Provo had the same test last week. I don't know. The website didn't say that. I guess they really should update the website, if nothing else, to save people from having to go into Idaho when they really don't mean to.

It's like walking all the way through Mordor to get to Mount Doom, just to find out that throwing the ring in the hearth fire would have sufficed after all if I just left it in there for a while.

I Dream Avatar Fanfiction

Warning: Avatar Spoilers

Because she is his sister, Zuko decided not to throw Azula into prison after the events of the third season of Avatar. Instead, he found it a fitting punishment to exile her to an island-fortress kingdom in the far west of the Fire Nation. The island is ruled over by a teenaged king who had spent the war grudgingly watching the western boundaries of the Fire Nation against an enemy that never appeared; most believed there was nothing west of the Fire Nation. He would be both her guardian and her friend while she was in exile.

Azula, of course, was furious when she arrived. She behaved spitefully to the young king, whose laid-back exterior betrayed an intense interior. Finally, he grew tired of hearing that she deserved to rule the Fire Nation because she was the best, and he challenged her to a race around the outer walls of the fortress. Using a form of firebending similar to a flamethrower, he beat her in the race, using fire like jets out of his feet to drive himself to breakneck speed around the perilous course of the parapets. Humiliated by her defeat at the hands of a nobody, she challenged him to Agni Kai, but he refused, saying he knew she would beat him in that. The lesson to her was obvious: play to your strengths. It was a humbling moment, but Azula's new wisdom would be tested when a ship with dark sails appeared in the western ocean.

I dreamed all of this two nights ago. I am a major geek, I know.

"...what I do with my own time" PS

I blinked hazily from my bed, trying to lift a hand to block out the bright light in my face. I noticed two things immediately: first, I couldn't move my arm. Second, the bright light was being held by someone I knew well. Neuromancer. And Neuromancer was holding a very sharp knife.

Even though his face was shadowed behind the bright light, I could see his eyes, dangerous and cold like an old dog's. "I read your blog from Tuesday," he said, his voice as hard as a steamshovel.

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, trying to keep my voice light. "What did you think?"

He looked at the knife like he was trying to read something on the blade. "You said some pretty serious stuff. About William Gibson. About his books."

I tried to laugh. My voice cracked. "Oh, come on, Neuromancer, you know I love you! You know William Gibson is..."

He put his finger against his lips and my voice failed under his glare. "Oh, I know," he said, his voice hushed. "I just wanted to make sure you know. When you wake up, remember that there are some lines you just don't cross."

I was about to protest when he hit me right in the forehead. His fist was harder than I expected. When I woke up, he was back on the shelf, like he had never left. Or like he had accomplished what he wanted to do.

And the knife was resting on the pillow beside my head.

...what I do with my own time

I was listening to my Pandora radio station and came across a song called "Mona Lisa Overdrive" by the band Juno Reactor. It sounded like something from the soundtrack of Ghost in the Shell, which means, as my good friend the Lord Admiral would put it, it is relevant to my interests.

Upon investigation, I discovered (thanks to my old nemesis Wikipedia) that the song was performed by request for The Matrix Reloaded. This is, after all, very relevant to my interests, despite the fact that the second two Matrix movies sucked robot ass.

I frequently refer to William Gibson as my favorite living writer, and I am not about to withdraw that praise, but here I would like to say how disappointed I am with the majority of his writing. I found Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive very underwhelming; I kind of liked Virtual Light, quite liked Idoru, but couldn't stand All Tomorrow's Parties, which I found endlessly dragging to a flat finale--the whole novel could have been condensed to a hundred pages without losing a damn thing. My reaction to The Difference Engine was mixed (I found the story creative yet flawed in plotting), and the jury is still out on my final verdict. I flat-out loved Pattern Recognition, a postmodern romp through the high-tech modern world. I haven't read Spook Country yet because the reviews I found were generally negative.

This is a mixed bag, of course, but I haven't mentioned my two favorite Gibson works: Burning Chrome and, of course, Neuromancer, which needs no introduction. Some of the stories in Burning Chrome are some of Gibson's best work, particularly the title story, which I feel shows that perhaps he should constrain some of his big ideas to the short story format.

This is all a tangent based on one song, but this is my blog, and it's my business...

Impractical

He kicked the motorcyle's stand down and let it sit on the sun-baked sand beside the dealer man's wagon, the amped engine purring like it was happy with something. He pushed the goggles back, unhooking the heavy rubber mask with one hand, careful with the bad catch. He wore soft brown leather, real good against sand, and heavy mesh metal under all that in case someone got ideas. For as far as he could see beyond the rusty old wagon, nothing but sagebrush, stunted desert trees, and the blue-black mountains under the darkling sky. There was this heavy, ugly cloud blowing up from the south, but it wouldn't get there for at least half an hour, which gave him time to take the mask off and breathe the air for a bit.

The other guy was a pretty old one, both legs gone below the knee, his sweaty rolls of flesh wedged into a harness strung up all through this mobile home on runners. Made it so he bobbed around like a drunk spider getting from here to there, so he mostly just sat when people were watching. Didn't want to look stupid--too close to looking weak. His ride had these solar panels like some giant bug's wings. Why he parked in the middle of nowhere, only he knew. Maybe he knew he could deal here, like rats smell food. He had one of those cheap plastic helmets that made him look like a confused astronaut, and he was watching the guy in leather, waiting to see what his hands would do.

"You selling?" The guy in leather, voice heavy, no accent.

The guy in the harness just about coughed up a wad of phlegm getting his voice in gear. "Sure." Helmet made him sound like he's stuck his head in a well.

"Guns? Ammo?"

"Sure." Like it's just another thing, the harness guy's hand starts going for the piece they both knew was there, because if you're buying, it means you ain't selling, and you ain't selling what you ain't got. No point trading with a dead man, and that bike could come in all sorts of useful.

But leather guy's knife came out in a flash, but real casual, because they're still doing business. "Trade you vitamins. Got a half bottle."

Harness guy didn't like the development. Still had his hand half there, thinking about it. "Pulled it off some poor dead bastard, I'll bet."

"No one you knew." Eyes black like obsidian under the smear from the goggles. 'Don't try it' eyes. 'You'll like me better if you live' eyes. Real crazy eyes, the crazy you work at.

"Got this thing." Harness guy levered something down from the ceiling, where he had most of his shit taped up, because he needed the floor space for things like beans and those big plastic jugs of water. "Bought it off some of pilgrims going to see the old city. Said they'd bought it from some militia types who found Jesus. I reckon they found him all right, so now they go together permanent, know what I mean. This thing, impractical. Ain't much good past two hundred feet." Been waiting to pass it off to somebody crazy.

"Talk, talk," growled leather guy. He was looking at the thing, the barrel thicker than his head, this crank on the side and a hanging necklace of beads the size of coconuts that could have been the magazine. "You trading?"

Talking lazy, like it's not really a problem. "Half a bottle? Stab me and take it, at least that's honest. Throw in the knife. This little doggy leave a hole like a melon. Pieces everywhere."

"Impractical, you said."

"Real impractical."

He gave him the vitamins and the knife. Threw in some seeds, too, real good desert wheat. Never know if you're coming back again, need a good place to buy.

The Topaz Internment Camp

One of the less wholesome legacies of the Second World War in Utah is the memory of the Topaz Internment Camp, where more than eight thousand people of Japanese descent, many of them United States citizens who had lived in the country all their lives, were taken and held for three and a half years. They were placed behind barbed wire fences surrounded by guard towers manned by soldiers with guns. All Japanese, even those with just one-sixteenth blood, were considered potentially hostile.

Today, I went to a presentation by a survivor of that camp, a tiny woman with fluffy white hair, and a man whose parents had been in another camp. He introduced a number of black and white photographs taken from the National Archives, most of them about Topaz, as he told the story. At times, he would prompt the lady to tell a little of her own story. At the beginning, I had tears in my eyes, but I pulled it together before long and listened intently.

She had been seventeen and in high school when Pearl Harbor happened. She said she remembered going to school that next Monday and sitting in the back shivering, afraid of what might happen to her. Her teacher took her aside to tell her everything would be all right. Later, when they got the order to "evacuate" to the holding area they would stay while the camps were built, some of her friends from school came to see her off. As she described that to the audience, it was one of the moments she was genuinely touched with emotion.

She said they were first kept at a former racetrack in a stable with no windows that still reeked of animals. Later, they were moved by train to Utah. She had grown up in the San Fransisco area, so both the snow and the heat were new to her, and they were particularly bad because heating was by one stove. They lived in military-style barracks, with communal bathrooms, cafeterias, and laundry rooms. At first, there were no dividers between the bathroom stalls. She laughed when she said that they finally built shoulder-high dividers with curtains; it was a very sociable experience to use the bathroom. He told the story of one elderly woman who was so ashamed to be seen using the bathroom that she put a brown paper bag over her head with holes cut for eyes.

Many of the fathers were separated from their families. Because her father was a businessman who sold miso soup, he was taken away by the FBI to another facility.

Throughout the presentation, I was struck by her good humor and good will. She didn't express any bitterness toward the government, which, as the gentleman pointed out, she had every right to feel. Many of the stories he and she told were heartbreaking. High school and college students volunteered to teach elementary school. People of Japanese descent were called on to enlist in the Armed Forces to serve in the European theater; when they returned on leave, they had to visit their families behind barbed wire.

Topaz is now mostly abandoned, with just trash, foundations, and one re-built barrack at the site. There are plans for a permanent museum in the nearby town of Delta, though, and I do hope those plans come to fruition.

In the late eighties, the government offered formal letter of apology signed by the President to all survivors, along with twenty thousand dollars. As the gentleman pointed out, however, I doubt anyone would agree to live behind barbed wire under constant guard for three and a half years for twenty thousand dollars more than forty years later.

So often I forget that the past isn't just something in books and in videos. For someone, that was their present day, their experience in the passing moment, and they had to live with it. And they still do.

My Random Bathroom

I'm convinced my bathroom has a link somewhere to another dimension, or perhaps just Narnia. It seems it has a random scent every day (and not the scents you'd think, either). Today, it was incense. Maybe I'll keep you updated about what it smells like (no, I won't mention the scents you'd think, either).

Of course, I'm aware that the bathroom fan probably just links to another apartment through the ducts, but there's more magic to it this way!

Gene Generation

It had some interesting visual elements. Few and far between, especially buried under a combination of Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Dungeons and Dragons ripoffs. But it had some interesting visual elements.

The above is the only praise I can imagine for The Gene Generation. I have been following the progress of this film for a few years (has it been so long?) now, ever since I watched a trailer for it and was fascinated by the cyberpunk feel of it. The premise is really kind of awesome: there is a society in which one's worth is measured by the value of one's genes (a bit like Gattaca, but what's original these days?). There is a generation of criminals called "DNA hackers" who can alter a person's genes. There is, in turn, a group of assassins whose job it is to kill these DNA hackers because of the threat they represent to the delicate balance of society.

I found this quote about the film on another website: "In the dark decadent world of our future, Mankind has found themselves close to the extinction with the last city on Earth. Forced to implement a controversial Natural Selection process, the government built a wall surrounding the last city named Olympia. By a careful selection process using our genes and DNA, the Kalafkan Government chose only the best and most promising to survive the destruction of Olympia, before building a new city where it once was. This process led to a crime known as DNA Hacking, where people steal genes and DNA in hopes of entering Demeter. The government started hiring assassins, to take out and kill these hackers who have polluted the system. In exchange, the Assassins are granted entry to Demeter. Michelle (Bai Ling) is one of those Assassins. Forced to render her services to the government by any means necessary, Michelle can only hope that death wouldn’t take her soul down like Olympia would. The Gene Generation is a science fiction movie about romance, revenge and redemption" source

Holy shit, I say to myself. This sounds like a damn good movie. Apart from that incomprehensible line about death taking her soul down. That's a warning sign. ((Edit: And I also noticed later: how can the government implement a "Natural Selection" process? If the government is doing it, how is it natural? Isn't that the exact opposite of natural? Like this movie is the opposite of good?))

The first problem is what the film means by "altering genes." When I read the synopsis, I assumed that altering one's genes would, for instance, change eye color, hair color, possibly some physical features, depending on how implausible the show decided to be about the capacity of a device the size of a person's hand that jabs needles into your arm. I was wrong. Very wrong. Wrong like losing my glasses and mistaking an angry Doberman that's just been kicked in the nuts for kindly aunt Gretchen whose only happiness in life is a kiss on the cheek.

As it turns out, changing someone's genes can, in fact, do one of only two things in this film. The first is to close up wounds and heal disease (something shown in the show's intro and only mentioned later, never to play a part again). The second is to make a person sprout a mass of tentacles, writhe around, and die.

Re-read that last sentence. I should probably stop writing right there and let you fill in the rest of the movie for yourself. It probably wouldn't be far off the mark, and certainly won't be much worse than what I had to endure. The suck is endemic in this movie, like it was shot in Sucknicolor. There's a large middle-aged villain with long blonde hair and a deep voice; I'm convinced I've seen this exact character in another movie, possibly several others. There's a goateed mafia boss with a comically incompetent but seemingly limitless supply of leather-clad goons who spends most of the movie bitching about people not taking him seriously enough. There's a bunch of midgets wearing leather who show up just to have midgets wearing leather in the movie. Oh, hell. I'm sick of even thinking about this movie. Let's move on.

Bai Ling appears in a different outfit in every scene, and I have a sneaking suspicion the film's entire raison d'etre is for the producer/director to see her in these various skimpy leathery getups (not to mention out of them: there are two random shower scenes and an almost equally random sex scene). She wears so many different scandalous outfits, in fact, that in one scene where a character actually gives her clothes and says, "I brought you some clothes," I just about did myself in laughing. If there's one thing this chick has in abundance, it's clothes, although she appears to be hard up for cash in every other way.

She has a brother who is constantly getting into trouble for gambling and getting involved in crime. At one point, the mob boss I mentioned above pees on him. I stress, for reasons that will soon be apparent: he got peed on. Later in the film, he complains about having shit in his hair and smelling like shit. Another character comments that he smells like shit. Later, the mob boss laughs about having shat on this character. I'm not sure whether nobody on the set knows the basic but fundamental difference between the two bodily wastes, or whether they changed the one scene without bothering to change every bit of dialogue referring to it.

Speaking of bad changes: at one point, a character gets thrown through a window. I suppose they couldn't find a cheap graphics program that would simulate cracking glass and movement at the same time: the movie freezes for several seconds while cracks spread across the glass, the guy suspended in mid-air, and then the guy falls through. I was flabbergasted. In another part, during a hastily-cut fight scene, a still frame is shown for a full second. A small nitpick, perhaps; I guess nobody caught that nothing was happening in that clip. Was this thing edited in iMovie? The 3D effects are laughable, including 1990's style fire effects and unconvincing but repetitive shots of the city with a flying ship circling overhead. Oh, and apparently, in the future, cities exist in stone basins flanked by huge walls. And those stone walls have giant demons carved in them. Yeah.

But I've saved the worst for last. Faye Dunaway inexplicably appears in this movie... for about one minute. She gets a couple of lines, then suffers a catastrophic accident that leaves "her" a hanging torso prop covered in CG tentacles for the rest of the movie, never once moving from one tiny but oft-reused set. Her voice is also mushy, which I assume is because she got one look at the movie, called her agent, and finished the rest of her contract recording her lines over the phone from as far from the set as she could get.

Now, there's some leeway I could give this movie. It's apparently based on a comic, but since I have no knowledge or interest in it, I'll leave it at that. Also, the concept of "hacking" one's own genes is interesting. This movie, though? Come on.

Final Word: This film might have been just kind of bad with some redeeming qualities if it weren't for the tentacles, which feel like an afterthought added in post to spice things up. Cut out the writhing tentacles on the gene-altered people and just let them flop around and die instead; maybe their eyes go all black or something to show they're afflicted. Imagine watching a tender death scene where the main character watches the man she loves die... as his tentacles flop around. Mmmhmm. That's one of the last scenes of the movie.