Black ICE/White Noise

I remember the mid-90's, when cyberpunk was a legitimate genre for video games--ten years after it was a legitimate genre for fiction. Combine that with my fascination with vaporware and failed technology (the Jaguar), and you get a story that's definitely grabbed my interest.

If only I could find more about this game and its production!

Avatar: Special Edition

In the time since I last blogged, I've moved to a new city and started my PhD program at a new school. Despite all this, the first post I'm making is about Avatar, and having seen the new special edition at the theater. Yes, James Cameron can add a couple of minutes of bonus footage and I'll shell out ten bucks to go see the same movie again. But to tell the truth, I would have paid the same for the chance to go see Avatar again. It was 3D. I complained about it a bit the first time, but now I genuinely think it adds something. I felt drawn closer into the world, experiencing the scenery and things around the characters more distinctly. Because of focal length, the background stuff in 2D is often much fuzzier in 3D, which means you can look around a lot more freely in 3D.

So here are the new scenes, if I can recall them all.

-While flying out on his first mission as Avatar, Jake sees a herd of creatures we don't really see in the other version. It's a scene of a few seconds, but it sets up a scene later on, so I mention it.
-On that same mission, Grace, Norm, and Jake visit the old school. We see a series of bullet holes in the chalkboard, but Grace doesn't want to talk about it. When Jake asks why the Na'vi haven't come back, Grace says, "They've learned enough about us," or something to that effect. There's also a scene in which they find a Na'vi-sized copy of The Lorax. Grace says something about it being her favorite. I really hope this was Cameron poking fun at himself, rather than hammering home his point. This was a good scene, but we gathered as much from the movie as it was.
-When Jake sits down with the Na'vi around the fire, there's a brief scene in which Neytiri introduces herself and teaches Jake how to say her name. He still says it wrong.
-When Jake startles the little swirly-flying thing for the first time, Neytiri joins him in scaring them up to make them fly. This shows that she's seeing the forest through his eyes, experiencing his childlike wonder along with him.
-When Grace moves the project to the Hallelujah Mountains, Jakes explains why the levitation works as they get off the flyer. Since unobtainium is a superconductor, it works like maglev. "Or something." I didn't feel this was necessary information, but it's still cool.
-After Jake gets his banshee, he and the other hunters shoot some of the beasts I mentioned above. This leads directly into the "stone cold aerial killer" monologue.
-Yes, infamously, we get to see Jake and Neytiri link their qeues when they are mated after his initiation. This is maybe an additional three seconds. Big whoop. Hardly the "Na'vi sex scene" people keep yammering about online. Even in the original we see that their qeues are touching, and I assumed from the first time I saw the film that they linked them.
-We see the aftermath of the Na'vi attack on the bulldozers. The humans have all been massacred and the machines have been destroyed. Especially since this is seen through the eyes of the humans, I felt this scene was particularly important, and probably my favorite of all the ones they added. It shows the Na'vi struck first (admittedly with good reason) and it explains Selfridge's decision to attack Home Tree.
-During the final fight, we see that Tsu'tey survives getting shot and falling from the shuttle at least long enough to...
-After the last fight, Jake, Neytiri, and the Na'vi come across Tsu'tey as he lies dying. He tells Jake he needs to lead the Omaticaya, and says he is proud he fought beside Jake. This is the one addition I wish wouldn't have been included, since it's so sentimental and unnecessary, but it was a bit lightened when Jake answers, "I'm not officer material." But we all know he will do it.

There were some other brief moments, but I'm pretty sure I hit everything major.


The bottom line is that the extra stuff is good, but doesn't change the movie hugely (though I do enjoy that it complicates the plot a bit that the Na'vi destroyed the bulldozers and killed the humans guarding them). What's really key is that I was worried, going in, that I wouldn't connect as much with the film as I did the first few times I saw it. But I did. I was completely immersed, and I had tears in my eyes in several scenes.

So call me soft or call me a fanboy, but I loved seeing the Special Edition, even for ten more bucks. I might even see it again.

Tell Microsoft I'm Not Speaking To It

For the last few months, I've been using Microsoft's brilliantly useful Windows Live Workspace. It allows me to open my Microsoft Word documents anywhere and edit them easily within the Word application. This has allowed me to write and edit my fiction from several different places, such as my home computer and the computers at work. So far, so good. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided they're going to cancel Live Workspace and transfer everything to SkyDrive.

Any my version of Word doesn't support SkyDrive.

That leaves me with three equally unpalatable choices. One, go back to much less convenient work-arounds, such as emailing myself documents or using another, less integrated service. Two, use the crappy in-browser editor Microsoft gives you with SkyDrive, which is about equal to this cheapo text editor I'm using to write this blog. Three, buy a new version of Microsoft Office for around a hundred fifty bucks just so I can keep going with the service I've gotten used to.

I can shrug off most inconveniences, but I'm furious about people messing with my writing. You can't dangle this great service in front of me and then take it away from me if I don't pay you more money, Microsoft. That's just not right.

I can't help but think it wouldn't be difficult to continue to support Workspace. It gives me less storage space than SkyDrive, which is fine by me, since I'm only using it for text documents. If I chose to voluntarily keep using Workspace, I could save Microsoft some storage space. Yeah, storage is currently ridiculously cheap, and I'm sure it's assigning employees to keep the system running that's the issue, but that doesn't make me any happier. This just stinks of Microsoft wanting me to buy a new product just so I can keep doing something they offered me before with my old product.

I'm genuinely upset. I don't know what I'm going to do. I genuinely want to keep using this service, but I don't have that kind of money. To add insult to injury, Workspace still assures me it's in Beta. Does this mean there will never be a release version? Have I been teased this whole time? I'm so mad I can hardly even type. I'm so mad my skin's turning... kinda... green. I... can't... think straight. No... not again...! I........


RAAAAAAAAAAAAR! HULK SMASH!

A Very Half-Assed Reaction to The Legend of the Seeker

I watched a single episode of The Legend of the Seeker, on which I will now base my opinion of the entire show. It wasn't even the first episode, but episode 18 of season 2, because that's the closest to the beginning Hulu would show me for free. I obviously don't care enough about writing a review to bother spending money on it, or even the time it would take to find a pirated stream of the first episode. Here be spoilers, but since I have no idea who is whom and what's going on, it would be difficult for me to spoil anything majorly.

The villain is hideously cheesy. He has a goatee, long hair, a cape, and speaks with a British accent. To add an even more obviously derivitive level of cheese, he's dead in this episode, and longs to come back to life, missing "the taste of a crisp apple." At the very end of the episode, he grabs an apple out of a basket, takes a bite, and looks meaningfully at the camera. I wish I could make this up. At that point it went from ripping off Pirates of the Carribean to being an outright homage to it. (I called him Cheesy in my mind, since I could never figure out what name they were saying.) He was also the hero's brother, which he constantly reminds the viewer by calling him "brother" at the slightest chance. Makes me wonder whether fantasy worlds are really just composed of three extended families. And a bunch of peasants, of course.

Perhaps because the episode was so late in the series, there was no character development for any of the main characters. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what any of them do. One of them seemed to have the ability to take over the mind of anyone whose eyes she looks into, which they called "confession." I guess having grown up Catholic confused me about the actual meaning of the word, but it would explain some things about organized religion (oo, burn, but I don't really mean that about religion; I only wonder if the show/writer did). There was also a wizard (played by the gyrocopter pilot from the Mad Max movies) who could shoot fire from his hands and said everything important with his eyes OPENED REALLY WIDE. There was one laugh out loud moment when he "cast a spell" by holding his hand off-camera while the spell sound effect went off. BUDGET-TASTIC.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is that the show all felt like it was set in a generic medieval world. The villains wore chainmail and tabards fresh from the prop department and got chopped up with minimal effort. Major plot events unfolded in a generic tavern. Everyone wore tunics and boots and dresses. The hot warrior women villains wearing tight tight leather seemed to have been lifted from any half-assed modern fantasy novel, which I suppose is what the source novels might well be. I confess to never having read them and having no intention to do so. So really, this review is more like quarter-assed at best.

The show was also rife with generic fantasy names. I have a theory that you can judge any fansty story by adding together unpronouncable names and generic words capitalized to form proper nouns. It's like golf: the higher your score, the shittier your fantasy. There were more than a few of the former: when spoken, I count any word as unpronouncable if I have no idea how to spell it even after hearing it a half-dozen times in the show. Of the latter there were plenty: The Keeper, The Seeker, The Spirits, The Midlands, The Stone of Tears, The Creator, The Lands of the South, The Sisters of the Dark, The Veil... seriously, is there a shortage of proper nouns in this world? It's like whoever was coming up with names for things just gave up halfway. Along these lines, I could call my magical chair The Chair, my keyboard The Keyboard, and my computer mouse Raymond, because I also haven't mentioned that half the characters have completely normal English names like Walter, while the other half have generic fantasy names. Here I should give an example of one of those generic fantasy names, but I wasn't paying close enough attention to actually pick any up. Or know how to spell them.

The episode centered around what I can only call a wacky caper by two minor villain characters, as the 'story' plot it was woven into consisted of The Seeker trying to take The Scroll from The Sisters of the Dark to protect The Veil, and the writers may have realized this was way too generic fantasy to hold even their core watchers' attention. So wacky buddy hijinx it was. (I realize it was the Scroll-of-Something-or-Another, possibly the Scroll of MacGuffin, so I didn't list it above, but they DID refer to it for most of the episode as simply 'The Scroll.')

To reiterate, there were plenty of fantasy staples: an evil temple, a tavern, a Renfaire town market, bad guys in chainmail carrying crossbows, Burning Hands, a villain with a goatee and English accent, an old wizard with long white hair, a generic fantasy hero with a destiny and no charisma (I'll rant about destiny some other time), cold-hearted villain women who are both way too good looking and way too thin to be a combat threat, etc, etc, etc.; I could go on about these at length, but it also seemed like the heroes were just too darn powerful for me to think they might not succeed. They blew through dozens of bad guys hardly taking a scratch. In one scene the characters find it almost laughably easy to transfer a character from one body to the other and bring another character back from the dead. This scene had me in near stitches because the actress spoke the 'magical language' (repeating the same phrases over and over) with an ahfahl Amahrucan accahnt. Nothing ruins the magic of a made-up language like that swallowed R.

The hero of the spoof Krod Mandoon, although that show was absolutely awful, seemed kind of likeable for his everyman personality and sense of humor. The hero of this show (the titular Seeker) only seemed really focused, because he just looked at things intensely. Or maybe he just needs glasses. But like I said before, this episode didn't center on him, and I'm not sure if he got more than ten lines in the whole thing.

There were, however, some moments I found kind of cool. ... Okay, I've sat here for literally five minutes since typing that, and none come to mind. But there really were some moments that made me think, "Hey, that's kind of cool." At the end of the day, every criticism I've had, I say with love. This is the corny, derivitive crap that I've seen pop up again and again in books, magazines, roleplaying games, TV shows, and movies. And, like an annoying friend who just keeps coming around, it's grown on me, and now those silly tropes and over the top plot devices are familiar and, yes, even dear to me.

The production values, while TV level, weren't the worst I've lived with, and I do love me some fantasy, even when it's hardly great. It's magic, heroes with swords, and escapist. I've been telling bad fantasy stories with my buddies since I was a kid, and some part of me loves even the really cheeseball stuff like this. To paraphrase what Brian Posehn says in his video about "Metal By Numbers," compared with sitcoms or reality TV, even shitty fantasy rules!

Toshiro Mifune Kills Indians

Let's just get this out of the way: the most obvious drawback of the movie Red Sun is that Toshiro Mifune's voice is dubbed when he speaks English. I've heard it was one of his greatest regrets that he was never allowed to use his voice for his English lines in his movies, and that makes me doubly sad. Mifune's voice is inimitable, resonating and powerful, and any voice they choose for him doesn't do the great actor justice. I really wish there was a version with his original voice, but I'm afraid I'm not so lucky.

That being said, Red Sun is a Western with Toshiro Mifune in it. In one movie, he adds Indians, banditos, and cowboys to The List of Things Killed by Toshiro Mifune. While his voice might not be his own (save when he speaks Japanese), his powerful screen presence commands this movie, and that alone is worth the almost two hours of runtime.

It's by no means a perfect movie, and so I'll anticipate some of the complaints you might have, and answer them all accordingly.

You: It's a hackneyed Western plot with stock characters and situations.
Me: It's Toshiro Mifune in a Western.

You: The writers clearly had only a cursory knowledge of Japanese culture.
Me: Toshiro Mifune plays a samurai badass.

You: Although the plot initially balances Charles Bronson's character with Toshiro Mifune's, the middle of the movie is heavily geared toward Bronson's character, and Mifune becomes something of a sidekick.
Me: Toshiro Mifune is no man's sidekick, least of all Charles Bronson's. He badasses his way right into the spotlight, whether the director wanted him to or not. Even when he's not speaking or doing much of anything, he's BEING TOSHIRO MIFUNE.

You: The supporting cast, particularly Ursula Andres as a whore who can't keep her shirt on, is disappointing.
Me: You'd be disappointing, too, if you were standing next to Toshiro Mifune.

You: The plots and conflicts are so contrived they practically groan for you.
Me: HAVE YOU HEARD NOTHING I'VE SAID? IT'S TOSHIRO M.F.ING MIFUNE IN A WESTERN!!!

Also, Charles Bronson's character is actually pretty likeable.

The Story of a Soldier

I love the song "The Story of a Soldier" from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I regularly cite that movie as one of the three best ever made (that I've seen, of course), and this sublime song is beautiful outside the song as well. I listen to it especially when I'm in a mood for Westerns. For those of you familiar with the film, (SPOILERS->) it's the song the Confederate prisoners are made to sing in the prison camp as the guard beats Tuco.

The extended version of the DVD has a longer version of the song on it, and the soundtrack CD has the full thing. I love that the song was written for the movie, but it sounds almost like an authentic Civil War era folk song. Here are the lyrics to the full version:

Bugles are calling from prairie to shore,
Sign up and fall in and march off to war;
Drums beating loudly, hearts beating proudly,
March blue and gray and smile as you go.

Smoke hides the valleys and fire paints the plains,
Loud roar the cannons till ruin remains;
Blue grass and cotton burnt and forgotten,
All hope seems gone, so soldier, march on to die.

Count all the crosses and count all the tears,
These are the losses and sad souvenirs;
This devastation once was a nation,
So fall the dice, how high is the price?

There in the distance, a flag I can see,
Scorched and in ribbons but whose can it be?
How ends the story? Whose is the glory?
Ask if we dare our comrades out there who sleep.

Count all the crosses and count all the tears,
These are the losses and sad souvenirs;
This devastation once was a nation,
So fall the dice, how high is the price we pay?

To me, the song speaks beautifully of the loss and devastation of war, and also of the way men who live in difficult times struggle on while longing for a better life. I think it's wonderful the way a song from a movie or TV show can become so important to me even away from its original context. Are there any songs like that for you?

Random Writing Thought

I'm currently writing a story with the working title "The Month of Two Suns." I can't help but think that "The Day of Two Suns" sounds much more dramatic, not to mention much more like a good fantasy story. A month is just too much time. It's hard to remain excited/scared about anything for a whole month, even if you're living in a fantasy world that has no TVs or Internet. The first few days you might run around and bump into things, but sooner or later, you have to eat something.

"Month" is, naturally, the amount of time the two suns appear in the story (which is to say, the sun and a comet), but I can't help but want to change it to "Day". If I see anything titled "Month" in a journal, I might just skip it, thinking it's just too long to bother with. I don't have the imagination at the moment to follow a whole month's itinerary, even if it's stuffed full of swashbuckling action and rip-roaring adventure (what exactly is the origin of that expression?). And the story isn't about the whole month anyway, just the end of it.

Do you think this hard about the titles for things? I know it really doesn't matter, since it's just a working title anyway. So, what did YOU spend your free time today doing?

The Web Ebb

I'm coining that, by the way. If this becomes a real thing, then I'm the first one who came up with it. Even if someone else has used it, I testify that I haven't heard of it, so I came up with it independently. Anyway, on with the show.

Lately, I've noticed that some of my friends are either thinking of leaving Facebook or outright leaving it. Most of my friends have either closed down their MySpace or at least stopped using it. Five years ago, I would have seen five to ten of my friends on instant messenger at any given time, and now I see maybe two or three.

I don't know whether this is a real trend or just something in my demographic. I know that my generation, the ones in their mid to late twenties, was the first to be immersed completely in the digital age. I was around eleven or twelve when I first really started getting into computers: the internet, email, that sort of thing. I remember when I fell for one of the first "Bill Gates will send you money if you forward this to all your friends" ploys. I remember the days I would type in a topic, add .com, and see what came up. Those were the days before Google, when WebCrawler, Lycos, and Excite were my main search engines. Within a few years, everyone I knew had instant messenging and email. And a few years after that, we started hearing about just how plugged in we are. I've heard it said that the computers have gone from another activity you do to the way we live.

But these days, it seems like that mad rush into the digital frontier, the topic of so many TV specials and documentary films, is slowing down. Maybe it's across the board and maybe it's just those of us who have been immersed in it for more than a decade, but it feels like people are starting to come up for a breath. I've heard it said many times that the internet age sneaked up on us, and we found ourselves plugged in without realizing how far in we'd gone, but I think that awareness is becoming more common. We've been jacked in for so long that we're starting to see the effects it's really had on our lives--and we're starting to pull back.

I won't claim that I'm starting to use the computer less, just that my desire to do so has waned. I still get anxious if I go more than a couple of hours without checking my email. I still check Facebook at least three times a day. But when I do so, I spend much less time on it. I visit my favorite sites out of habit, but I don't stay long. I've stopped playing massively multiplayer online games and online RPGs. I'm no longer really interested in having conversations with people I've never met. That novelty has long since worn off.

I noticed a smaller web ebb a few years ago when people stopped using MySpace and blogs quite as much. For a while out of high school and into college, it felt like a half dozen of my friends had regular blogs. These days, no one I know posts more than once a week. Sure, there are sites like Twitter, but I don't know anyone in my age range who's really jumped into that. In particular, I feel like we are less and less likely to all get excited about something new, getting on some new service or program.

It's possible the web has become just so integrated into our lives that it's no longer exciting, but I don't think that's it. I think we're genuinely starting to drift away from our computers. In some small way, I think the real world is starting to have that novelty effect that the digital world had for us fifteen years ago. We've gone so long plugged in that unplugging has become the new frontier.