Ten years later, you still can’t take the sky from me

Posted on September 20, 2012 by wellsdc

Ten years ago today, a Golden Age of television began. Though it only lasted three months, we still feel its impact today. I am talking, of course, about the premiere of Joss Whedon’s Firefly on September 20, 2002.

There is no way to do the show justice in the format of a blog post. Since it was one of the most quotable shows in television history, I’ll let the coda of the pilot episode, “Serenity,” speak for me. (For those unfamiliar with the show, Captain Malcolm Reynolds commands a Firefly-class ship named Serenity. He has taken on two fugitives, a young doctor and his sister, who are on the run from the fascist-like Alliance. In the final scene of the pilot, Mal has offered the doctor, Simon, and his sister a place on the ship):

Simon: I’m trying to put this as delicately as I can… How do I know you won’t kill me in my sleep?

Mal: You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake, you’ll be facing me, and you’ll be armed.

Simon: Are you always this sentimental?

Mal: I had a good day.

Simon: You had the Alliance on you… criminals and savages… half the people on the ship have been shot or wounded, including yourself… and you’re harboring known fugitives.

Mal: We’re still flying.

Simon: That’s not much.

Mal: It’s enough.

Click to embiggen

The show had a small following during its run, myself included, and I tried to do my part to support it. Perhaps one of my most-prized possessions is this thank-you note I received from the “Cast & Crew” of the show. It would have been cooler if they had all signed it, but I’m not really that greedy.

Firefly‘s release on DVD brought it much of its fame. That, and the anguished cries of people who never saw it on television yet wanted to know how such a good show could have such a short run. I suspect Firefly‘s DVD popularity helped prove the viability of releasing whole TV seasons (or shows) as DVD sets. Fan pressure even helped get a feature film made that, disappointingly but aptly, wrapped up some of the longer threads of the series. (Fun fact: the dead city on the planet Miranda in the movie is actually a high school campus in Pomona, California.)

It would make me sound like an annoying Whedon fanboy to say that Firefly was ahead of its time, that the television-watching masses were not ready for this type of show, or that Fox condemned the show from the start with bad marketing and scheduling. All of those things are true to some extent, but let’s just take a moment to appreciate that good television shows do exist. As that guy in Blade Runner said, the light that shines twice as bright only burns half as long. That quote probably applies here somehow.

Finding archetypes where none exist: another mutilation of Game of Thrones

Posted on September 13, 2012 by wellsdc

Any discussion of the women of Game of Thrones that fails to mention Septa Mordane is wrong. Just plain old wrong.

I’m about to geek out on Game of Thrones again, fair warning. I will limit my discussion, as best I can, to the television show up to this point, but beware of spoilers.

Over on Huffington Post, Ann Marie Rasmussen decided to blow her nose on her keyboard and call it commentary on female archetypes in the Game of Thrones series. It is the sort of reasoned analysis that makes you suspect that she had never heard of the show, let alone the books, until a couple of hours before her deadline, and that she spent at least an hour of that time eating a sandwich.

She does an appreciable job of shoehorning some of the show’s female characters into some prefabricated fiction archetypes, although none of them quite seem like traditional “fantasy” archetypes: the Tomboy, the Princess, the Seductress, the Self-Made Woman, and the Good Wife. Wha?

Let’s start with the “Tomboy,” Arya Stark, or as Rasmussen calls her, “the little daughter with a boy’s haircut.” It is actually entirely incidental to Arya’s persona that she has a boy’s haircut. Yoren cut her hair so that the Lannisters wouldn’t find and decapitate her. Not very archetypal, I dare say. Arya’s tomboyishness is not so much an important part of the story as the trials she has to endure to survive. At any rate, Arya is not the bone I have to pick with Rasmussen. Let’s move on to Sansa Stark.

Sansa, of course, is the “Princess” archetype, but it is Rasmussen’s description of her that wakes my dragon: “Sansa Stark, sister to the Tomboy, is not too bright and is often punished for her vapid and romantic delusions.” No, just no. Yes, Sansa begins the series as the spoiled, petulant mean girl of the Stark family, but that just makes her struggle more tragic. She grew up believing in the tales of gallant knights and beautiful princesses, and the prospect of becoming queen was dangled right in front of her. Not only must she now endure beatings from the very knights she thought would protect her, but she had to watch as her prince ordered the execution of her father right in front of her. She is not being punished for being vapid. She is being punished by a psychopath with no checks on his power. She is not stupid. She is a survivor. She may be annoying to watch, but it is that veneer of helplessness that is keeping her alive. Do not mess with Sansa.

Continue reading →

Weather Puns = Fun

Posted on September 5, 2012 by wellsdc

Tropical Storm Kirk was kind of a bust, only briefly achieving hurricane status before wandering north up the Atlantic and into a footnote in the history of meteorology. About the only interesting thing to come of it was a rare moment of levity from the National Weather Service:

TROPICAL STORM KIRK DISCUSSION NUMBER 20
NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL112012
1100 AM AST SUN SEP 02 2012

KIRK IS NOT EXPECTED TO LIVE LONG AND PROSPER. VISIBLE SATELLITE IMAGES AND A 1214 UTC ASCAT PASS INDICATE THAT THE SYSTEM STILL HAS A CLOSED CIRCULATION BUT IT IS BECOMING ELONGATED. MAXIMUM RELIABLE WINDS IN THE ASCAT PASS WERE AROUND 45 KT SO THE INITIAL WIND SPEED IS HELD AT THAT VALUE. KIRK WILL LIKELY BECOME POST-TROPICAL LATER TODAY OR DISSIPATE JUST BEFORE IT MERGES WITH A FRONT THAT IS CURRENTLY LOCATED ABOUT 200 N MI TO ITS WEST.

(Emphasis added)

I could point out that “Live long and prosper” is Spock’s line, not Kirk’s, but there’s a more obvious joke here: since the storm initially talked big but proved to be nothing but a mass of hot air destined for obscurity, it had much more in common with Kirk Cameron than with Captain James T. Kirk. I couldn’t find any appropriate Kirk Cameron memes, though, so here are a few riffs on Captain Kirk instead.

Television Magic Needs Rules, or, Why Russell Edgington Needs to F***ing Die, Already (True Blood spoilers within)

Posted on August 26, 2012 by wellsdc

The only thing worse than an annoying character is an all-powerful annoying character with no apparent weaknesses. In preparation for tonight’s True Blood season finale, I’m going to kvetch a bit.

In season 3 of True Blood, Sookie et al had to contend with the 3,000-year-old, entirely-psychotic vampire Russell Edgington. Basically, no character could do much of anything to hurt him, at least physically, on their own. The only explanation ever given for this, as best I can recall, was that he is over 3,000 years old. Evidently, vampires only get better with age. It was only through a collective effort that the main characters were able to weaken Russell by getting him into the sun, and then they proceeded to not kill him. I still don’t get that. I suspect that the producers wanted to keep his character on the back burner for the time when they decided to start phoning it in, e.g. season 5. (Seriously, how do you bring back Russell when Roman barely had a chance to do anything yet?)

Now, in season 5, a group of religious fanatic vampires who never seem to leave their conference room have brought Russell back to assist with their whatever-the-hell-they’re-doing, and Russell has entirely predictably gone off the deep end and freaked everybody way the fuck out. Setting aside the question of how the characters didn’t see that coming, were the producers expecting the viewers to be surprised? Once again, no one can stand against Russell because (cue inscrutable accent) he is over 3,000 years old!!! Continue reading →

The Robot Apocalypse begins here

Posted on July 14, 2012 by wellsdc

This may be the coolest thing I have ever seen:

According to Ray Walters at Geek.com:

Morphex was created by Norwegian Engineer Kare Halvorsen who has a passion for creating hexapod robots in his spare time.

Probably one of his more impressive pieces of work, he has recently updated Morphex to not only have the ability to transform from a ball to a robot, but also to be able to roll about while in sphere form as illustrated in the video above.

To create the aforementioned locomotion, the six-legged robot uses the motors on one side of its body to push itself along while contracted into a ball. The result, while not optimal, is a method of travel that moves Morphex in an arc rather than a straight line. Because of the asymmetric design that results from the hexapod moving itself across the floor, it’s impossible right now to straighten itself out. Still though, this is a pretty impressive upgrade that Halvorsen has incorporated.

That’s pretty damn amazing, but something about this is troubling me….

Yup, that’s it.

Stan Lee Wept

Posted on June 4, 2012 by wellsdc

So, apparently this really exists:

ACC Studios has published the most politically divisive comic book ever written, Liberality For All #1 (in a series of eight issues) releases nationwide November 2, 2005 . It is an all-new take on the Orwellian future, this time with a captive society oppressed by doves, not hawks. It is the first comic book directly marketed to the “vast right-wing” audience.

While this action-packed, patriotic knee-in-the-groin to the embodiment of the ultra-left is a blatant satire of liberalism, it still asks significant questions about the end result of liberal political policies.

‘It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. America is under oppression by ultra-liberal extremists who have surrendered governing authority to the United Nations. Hate speech legislation called the “Coulter Laws” have forced vocal conservatives underground. A group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and a young man born on September 11, 2001, set out to thwart Ambassador Usama bin Laden’s plans to nuke New York City.’

When first announced in late July, Liberality For All immediately touched off a controversy that is still raging. The resulting enthusiasm from conservatives, and simultaneous denunciation as neo-con indoctrination propaganda by those on the Left, continues to feed a firestorm on this provocative, full-color, eight-issue, comic book mini-series.

This press release is from November 1, 2005, but I had never heard of this epic controversy until just now. I had also forgotten just how stupid things got around the middle of the last decade. Lest anyone think we have presently entered an unprecedented era of self-styled conservatives completely losing their shit, I present Liberality for All. Things have been stupid for quite a while. (Incidentally, the ACC Studios webpage appears to have received its most recent update in June 2006. Perhaps its editors rage-quit after the Democratic victory in the 2006 mid-term elections.)

The “alternate cover” is pictured here. The fantasy-fulfillment element is quite remarkable. This appears to depict a one-eyed Sean Hannity, for some reason holding an Apple laptop and dressed sort of like an X-Man. The real kicker though, is G. Gordon Liddy, who would be 90 to 91 years old in 2021, riding a hog. The other cover also depicts a by-then 78 year-old Oliver North, but at least it shows him with a cane. Maybe he didn’t receive any “bio-mechanical enhancements.” It is impossible to look at this and not make a joke about how these three probably can’t look at these comic book covers without getting erections. Continue reading →

Thoughts on Game of Thrones: Blackwater Keep on Rollin’

Posted on June 3, 2012 by wellsdc

"Tyrion Battlecry" by ~Kanish, on deviantART

To all who lament television’s sharp descent into unscripted hell, “Blackwater” reminded us of what the television medium can do. This was epic storytelling at its finest. Any deficiencies in settings or backdrop, such as the facts that the magnificent city of Qarth appears to be little more than a series of rooms, and Jon Snow’s trek in beyond the Wall seems to involve walking back and forth across a single span of glacier, have led to the spectacle of the Battle of the Blackwater.

Who is the “good guy” in this battle? The lack of an easy answer to that question is at the heart of the story’s genius. We like Tyrion and want him to succeed, but his success most likely means the Lannisters’ success. We don’t much care for Stannis Baratheon, but we like Davos Seaworth. Same problem. The closest thing to a “protagonist” army that we have are those of Robb Stark and Daenerys Targaryen, and we’re beginning to see that they aren’t much better than anyone else.

This episode focused exclusively on the events of a single night in King’s Landing, so we got to see much more development of individual characters than usual. Tyrion got one of the best Braveheart speeches in television history, and finally served as a heroic character rather than a comic one (see last season’s battle fought while Tyrion was unconscious, the only time the show has ever overtly resorted to “dwarf humor.”)

Sansa demonstrated her own strength and leadership when Cersei fled their hiding place with Tommen. Unfortunately, she may have lost the only two people who ever truly protected her in King’s Landing: Tyrion, who is now wounded, and the Hound, who is running away. Cersei at least understands the importance of keeping Sansa alive, but we know that she will not step up to protect Sansa if Joffrey threatens her. Continue reading →

The strangest science fiction film you will ever see

Posted on May 25, 2012 by wellsdc

And I’m posting it to my blog!

Since I won’t be blogging for a few days on account of being near a beach, I present Fantastic Planet, or La Planète Sauvage, a 1973 animated film by French animator René Laloux. The trailer is at left, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing. It is, simply stated, a mindfuck (via Wikipedia):

The film depicts a future in which human beings, known as “Oms” (a homonym of the French-language word hommes, meaning men), are creatures on the Draags’ home planet, where they are seen as pests and sometimes kept as pets (with collars). The Draags are an alien species which is humanoid in shape but a hundred times larger than humans, with blue skin, fan-like earlobes and huge, protruding red eyes. The Draags also live much longer than human beings – one Draag week equals a human year. Some Oms are domesticated as pets, but others run wild, and are periodically exterminated. The Draags’ treatment of the Oms is ironically contrasted with their high level of technological and spiritual development.

The movie is pretty damn dark. It opens with a group of Draag children (who are around 50 feet tall) toying with a human female and her baby. Eventually, one of them picks up the woman and drops her to her death. One of the children keeps the human baby as a pet, and, well, you can see where this is going. It’s fair, in my opinion, to call this a science fiction masterpiece, in its own strange way.

(Alternate English and French versions on YouTube.)

In space, no one can hear you scream, still.

Posted on May 23, 2012 by wellsdc

By now everyone has probably seen multiple Prometheus trailers. My favorite is actually still the first teaser trailer, which has almost no dialogue and a lot of loud, scary sound effects:

Maybe it just fits with my ADHD.

What I did not realize, until someone helpfully posted it to YouTube, is that the original trailer for 1979’s Alien used the same creepy sound effect, and it is just as scary. I’ve seen Alien dozens of times, and this still creeps me out:

Less than three weeks to go!

Thoughts on Game of Thrones: “I hope it’s a very beautiful bridge”

Posted on May 21, 2012 by wellsdc

This episode was really nothing but battle prep. The theme seemed to be “doing what must be done.”

Qhorin Halfhand, captive of the wildlings along with Jon Snow, told Jon explicitly that he must do what needs to be done. We don’t know exactly what that is yet (well, I think I do, but I’m not telling.)

Daenerys must go to the House of the Undying to save her dragons. This scene in the book was a twenty-page acid trip. I can’t wait.

Tyrion must mount a defense of King’s Landing, basically by himself. Everyone else is caught up in their own petty crap. Tyrion enjoys the “Game,” as does Tywin. Cersei and Jaime hate it. All three of Tywin’s children have relied on their family’s wealth all their lives, but Tyrion has had to develop the most skills in order to survive. Both Cersei and Jaime showed remarkable clumsiness–Jaime by haphazardly killing Stark men, and Cersei by threatening and hurting the wrong woman while trying to get at Tyrion. Tyrion’s only weakness is Shae. Continue reading →

Cryptic Philosopher

Aroused by the Oxford Comma

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