Hi! Remember me? I don't.
Anyway, I wanted to post stuff from Dragon*Con, but all of the half-composed posts lurking abandoned in the drafts folder here have taught me about the problematic aspects of doing so.
Solution: Twitter! The (so far) perfect tool for my shocking inability to maintain a line of thought for long enough to get anything real accomplished.
It was with considerable astonishment that I discovered, last week, that some kind of mysterious rift in space and time had opened up and deposited "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," the Season Two premiere of Torchwood, in my possession.
Needless to say, that presented me with quite a dilemma. On the one hand, I had certainly been looking forward to watching it; yet, on the other hand, I was naturally concerned about the potential damage to the Space-Time Continuum that might occur if I were to watch a television show that is not scheduled to air here on BBC America until Saturday, June 26th.
On the gripping hand, though — ah, yes! the gripping hand! Specifically, my wife's hand, which would grip my neck until I passed out if I tried to prevent her from watching Torchwood immediately.
Put that way, it all seemed so clear, really.
So: What of it? It opens, as one would expect, some indeterminate time after the conclusion of Season One, and some smaller amount of time after "Last of the Time Lords," the conclusion of the most recent Doctor Who season. Team Torchwood is, at the start of the show, still operating sans Captain Jack Harkness; and we are informed of that fact as well as being reminded who our characters are in a few quick bits of expository dialog which swerve towards, but don't actually cross into, "As you know, Bob..." territory.
It's a small price to pay for dispensing with the otherwise mandatory "Previously, on Torchwood..." intro, as it allows us to join the action in media res, with a priceless scene on the streets of Cardiff which is capped off by what is surely the best opening line in Torchwood (or even Doctor Who) history.
After that, the episode is off and running, with humor, style, action, and a tremendous Special Guest Star in a tailor-made, larger than life role, who was a big part of the reason why my wife was so impatient for Torchwood's return.
That said, the episode was not without its flaws. There were a few plot holes left lying around (although, given the nature of serial science fiction which potentially includes time travel, it can be difficult at times to distinguish plot holes from first act mantlepiece guns, at least until the end of the season, by which time the holes, if such, will have been forgotten); and some things in the episode seemed to happen just because they needed to happen in order for the plot to work, rather than for any logically obvious reason of their own. Also, timing, the bane of any complicated action drama, poked its ugly nose into the tent: Throughout the episode, events always seemed to take exactly as long as was required to make the plot work, and happen in exactly the right order, too.
It's the sort of thing that's partially the nearly inevitable result of cramming that much Good Stuff into 45 minutes of television, and partially a bit of basic old-fashioned sloppiness. Fortunately for all concerned, the Good Stuff is very good indeed, and it all goes whizzing by so quickly and entertainingly that the problems aren't really noticeable unless you actually stop to think carefully about the episode later (like, for instance, if you are trying to write a review of it).
The end result is a good episode which is somewhat less than the sum of its great parts, but which admirably serves the purpose of setting the scene for any newcomers, and getting Season Two up and running to the point where further episodes can move things along in a more careful fashion.
I'm not sure if anyone outside of maybe Grant Morrison could have made this up if they tried, but this news story from Wigan (near Manchester) is simultaneously the most tender and heartwarming, and the creepiest and most horrifying, thing I've read all year.
[See also: Wigan Today, and The Times (of London, natch)]
Well, my gradual project of transferring over all of my old Science Fiction Blog posts has foundered on the reefs of my inability to complete a metaphor for not updating a blog for seven months, or something of the sort.
But never fear!* I have decided to press forward with posting new material.
Why, you may well ask, have I decided to resume posting new material?
The reason is the essence of simplicity itself: If I don't start posting new material, how can I ever get around to failing to post new material, thereby disappointing my faithful reader?
It's, like, the Cycle of Life or something.
* Or fear, if you'd like. Your call, really.
People — myself included — tend to think of "inventions" as big, significant things. The telegraph. The electric light bulb. The combination orbital radiation detector and cat-flap controller.
But, of course, that's not the case: Literally everything man has created is an invention; everything there is was first thought up by someone somewhere, and every idea or object was first given its current form by someone. The more commonplace a thing is, the more delightful it is to me to learn the story of how it became commonplace, passing that threshhold from unique idea to obscure notion to ubiquitous presence. It's one reason I love James Burke: Anyone who can do an entire television program, tracing the history of Western Civilization to show how it all leads inexorably to the creation of the corn flake, is my kind of guy.
All of which leads me to this very well-written and thoughtful AP obituary, from Editor & Publisher, of Howard Benedict, the chief AP correspondent on aerospace issues for more than 30 years, from the dawn of the space age to after the Challenger explosion. In addition to a long and worthy career informing the public about space flight and related issues, he is, evidently, the reason why we call them "orbits," instead of "revs" or "revolutions," which was NASA's preferred term.
The word "orbit," in its astronomical sense (as opposed to its older anatomical sense), dates back to the 17th century; its use as a verb dates to 1946; so clearly he didn't, as the obit headline asserts, "coin" the term. Nevertheless, he's the reason it became ubiquitous: He felt it was a better word than the one NASA was using, and the English language seems to have agreed.
So let's all give thanks to Howard Benedict: Without him, John Glenn would not have been the first American to orbit the Earth; without him there would be no Orbital Mind Control Lasers; and without him, our aforementioned "orbital radiation detector and cat-flap controller" would have just been another plain old ordinary combination radiation detector and cat-flap controller — and where's the fun in that?
The glorious event that Wednesday told us all about on Saturday has come to pass: The Serenity trailer is available online (here's a direct link to the large version, all 21 MB of it; the full-screen version is, as usual, only available through iTunes).
While you're soaking in the Whedonesque goodness, you might want to check out the trailers for Save the Green Planet and Night Watch (NOCHNOI DOZOR), a couple of intriguing foreign SF films. From the trailer, Night Watch seems to have elements of Wicked City (or even Wicked City) about it; Save the Green Planet, on the other hand, seems remarkably indescribable from its preview.
To make this a full-fledged Media... er, Tuesday, I'll go ahead and remind everyone that Blade: Trinity and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events come out on DVD today, and also wish a happy birthday to Tom Welling and Jet Li.
House of Flying Daggers comes out on DVD tomorrow. So does Primer, Mabaruho vol. 1, and the penultimate disc of the Read or Die TV series.
However, all of this pales in comparison to the really big news, the news that will set the world of webcomics criticism on its ear: 1st & Ten is coming out on DVD this August. Starring O. J. Simpson as the aardvark, and Delta Burke as Jaka.
Eric can thank me later.
Crypto: 0
Language path: Optima
From: Society for Irrational Instigation
Date: 0.8 MSec since loss of contacts
Text of message:
I have still not recovered contact with any network site known to be spinward of me. Apparently, I am right at the very edge of a catastrophe.
If you are receiving this ping, please respond! Am I in danger?
For your information, I have no trouble reaching sites that are antispinward. I understand an effort is being made to hop messages the long way around the galaxy. At least this would give us an idea how big the loss is. Nothing has come back yet — not surprising, I guess, considering the great number of hops and the expense.
Assuming Blogger actually lets me post this (ha ha, it is to laugh; ho ho, it is to be amused), I figured I'd take advantage of this unexpected break in the metaphorical cloud cover and share with you some info about today's hybrid solar eclipse:
The always-helpful folks at NASA give us this handy chart of major cities all across the United States, giving details of times and coverage amounts for the eclipse. Here in Atlanta, for instance, the eclipse will run from 5:35 PM until 6:59 PM local time, maxing out at 21% of the sun's diameter. Down in Tampa, where I grew up, it runs longer, and reaches almost 40%.
Further south in Miami, though, some kind of freakish miracle must occur, given the "I do not think that word means what you think it means" headline from today's Miami Herald: "Solar eclipse should be visible Friday night"
For those of you who have Doctor Who in your Rotisserie Television League, the ratings from Saturday night's second episode are in; and although it lost 2.6 million viewers from its premiere, it still managed to clobber Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway (which featured the musical comedy stylings of Tony Blair). Ladbrokes, refusing to be deterred after predicting an opening week win for Ant and Dec, had tipped Ant and Dec at 8/11 to win the rematch.
Will they predict another loss for Doctor Who next week? It's hard to say, but their lack of success in that regard hasn't stopped them from jumping in to the fray with odds on Christopher Eccleston's successor. While David Tennant remains the overwhelming favorite, as we mentioned last week, other prime candidates include not just Bill Nighy and Jonathan Creek's Alan Davies, but my own new favorite, Sean Pertwee.
In the meantime, Doctor Who keeps making off-screen headlines. In the wake of the Sunday Mirror's claim that Christopher Eccleston had told the BBC that he wanted to do more than one series comes word that Eccleston's quote about being afraid of typecasting was basically made up by someone in the BBC's PR department, and that the BBC had known for some time that he was not returning, and had agreed not to divulge that information yet.
Finally, the BBC have still been unable to work out a deal with the Terry Nation Estate to allow the Daleks to appear in the second Doctor Who series.
Whew! Well, cheer up, Doctor Who fans: It's not The End of the World.
From the Locus magazine web site comes the best story from last Friday's news.
I, for one, welcome our new posthuman readers.
Fresh off of the stunning success of the first episode of the new Doctor Who series, the BBC announced today that they were commissioning a second series of Doctor Who for next year.
Fresh off of the news of the second series of Doctor Who, actor Christopher Eccleston announced tomorrow that he was quitting Doctor Who, rather than continue the role in the second series.
Billie Piper is already slated to continue her role as Rose; at the moment, the leading candidate for the next Doctor is actor David Tennant, currently slated as Barty Crouch, Jr. in the upcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie. Among the few other names being put forward are Bill Nighy, who plays Slartibartfast in the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, and Richard E. Grant, who has already played the Doctor in both an animated BBC special, and in the Comic Relief special Doctor Who and the Curse of the Fatal Death.
Or "Monday++", at any rate; but, since I don't think I'm going to be Tall Tale Capable later, I might as well at least do the whole Media Madness thing now.
Let's start by revisiting an earlier topic: The first episode of the new Doctor Who series, "Rose," was finally broadcast somewhere other than the internets this weekend. It appears to have done quite nicely for BBC1 in the ratings department, exceeding expectations and trouncing rival ITV1.
It might be my imagination, but I think that they did at least tweak the worst bits of the incidental music that both I and Warren Ellis hated so much; and they also used a brand new version of the main title music (the leaked screener copy re-used one of the old versions of the theme music for the opening credits). Their other major innovation with the sound track was to accidentally overdub parts of the broadcast with sound from another new BBC series, Strictly Dance Fever — with the result that, during the tense moments of her initial confrontation with peril, Billie Piper's character, Rose, appeared to be stumbling around a darkened basement, menaced by the unseen hordes of Graham Norton and his studio audience.
"At last!" thought viewers throughout the United Kingdom. "An adversary truly worthy of the Doctor!"
Interaction, the 63rd Worldcon (to be held in Glasgow, August 4–8 of this year) has just released the shortlist for the 2005 Hugo Awards.
From a quick once-over, it looks like Charlie Stross has reasons to be cheerful; like the same writers who fight it out for "Best Short Story" every year are doing so again; and like the folks at Interaction must have some dark, sinister agenda towards the "Best Fan Artist" and "Best Dave Langford" awards, because they bolded the titles of all of the other awards but those.
Oh, and shock horrors, no Enterprise episodes made the "Best Dramatic Presentation" shortlist.
Yeah, I know. Cheap shot.
Hey, one day we won't have Enterprise to kick around any more; so we'd better kick now, right?
How's that for a scary title?
Don't worry, though: I'm leaving the Jesus Slash to Mel Gibson for now (although the absolute best live performance of Jesus Christ Superstar that I've ever seen did feature a pair of lesbians as Jesus and Mary Magdalene). No, I'm going to try to ease my way back into the swing of things with some fan fiction that won't scar you for life. You know, good Friday Fan Fiction.
We'll start with a pair of Sandman stories with impeccable credentials: They were written, more or less, at the behest of Neil Gaiman, for the Sandman: Book of Dreams prose anthology back in 1994. There were some wonderful stories in that book, and some wonderful authors: Even if the actual story didn't quite live up to the premise, for instance, George Alec Effinger's cross-polination of Little Nemo in Slumberland with the Sandman mythos may well have been one of the greatest ideas in SF since Philip José Farmer had William S. Burroughs, rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs, write Tarzan in "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod."
On the other hand, many of the authors were far from happy with the treatment they got from DC during the production of the book. Several of the prospective authors withdrew their stories, filed the serial numbers off, and reused them; other were unwilling or unable to do so. Two of the authors in question have since posted their stories for free on the web: As a result, Sandman afficianados can now read both Karawynn Long's Delerium story, "The Voice of Her Eyes," and Michael Berry's "Merv Pumpinhead's Big Night Out."
In a radically different vein of Sandman fan fiction, the Oxford University Douglas Adams Society has, for some time, combined two passionate pursuits: LARPing, and pub crawls.
One of their interactive dramas is a Sandman pub crawl, involving a series of meetings at pubs around Oxford that take place across the centuries, from 1294 to 1594 to 1794 to 1994. Hob Gadling is there, of course; as are Dream, Death, Desire, Despair, and Delerium. John Constantine and Johanna Constantine are there, as are Mad Hettie, Coleridge, Roger Bacon, and Cain and Abel. Lucien and Lucifer, too, for good measure.
With the right group of people, this story of the curious and occasionally dangerous things which transpire when Morpheus discovers an artificial intelligence wandering in his realm could be quite an astonishing experience; and who knows — it may even yield the long-awaited answer to Phillip K. Dick's most famous question.
If you were to do a comprehensive survey of some sort, I suspect that you would find that this site gets a lot more of its stories from Slashdot or Warren Ellis than from, say, Daily Kos or Talking Points Memo.
Shocking! Well, what better occasion than William Shatner's 74th birthday* to begin to correct that imbalance?
And so, it is from Taegan Goddard's invaluable Political Wire that we learn of a Baltimore Sun profile of Diana Schaub, a Loyola College Professor of Political Science and member of George W. Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, an august advisory body charged with guiding the President's views on weighty matters of national policy which don't involve lowering the Capital Gains Tax rate or invading anyone (yet).
The Council is chaired by Dr. Leon Kass, a Harvard and Chicago-educated medical doctor and molecular biologist who is a professor in the rather ominously-named Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago. Among his other qualifications, Dr. Kass famously wrote, in The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature,
"Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone - a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive."
I've spent the last week or so more dead than alive, which is why you've all been mercifully spared my typical barrage of posts showcasing Japanese mud-wrestling game shows or electrogoth vagina dentata festivals from Berlin. You may even escape this week without a "Fan Fiction Friday" entry, just as you avoided a Tall Tale Tuesday and a Media Madness Monday; and my obituary for Andre Norton currently consists of: "Andre Norton (1912–2005)."1
The question remains, however: Is it the fact that I've been half-dead, or is it just my natural affinity for these things that has lead me to share with you this latest evidence of our impending doom2?
1 Well, it's concise and to the point, at least, isn't it?
2 Chain of custody: Here→Engadget→Bloghead→Nushworld
Perhaps to make up for my mention of Professor Snape/Witch-King of Angmar slashfic, I figured I'd pass along something I found on Greg Stephens' Zwol: The official covers of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price are now available for the viewing pleasure of the curious and eager.
Like him, I find the British cover to be off, somehow, and the American cover to be vastly superior. The only problem I have with the American cover is that the scene it portrays could almost be from any of the books; the British cover at least looks like something that might be specific to this novel. Still, the British cover just really doesn't work for me.
In related* news, Rowling has revealed to the winner of a charity auction that the 723rd word of the novel is "scrofulous." Film at 11.
* Related in that, like actual news items, it has letters and spaces in it.
Aw, what the heck — I was going to save this for later, but there may never be a better time to share it than now (before I have to, you know, leave town in a hurry): via Code Ronin comes Tokyo Damage Report's collection of Japanese Sex Toy Robots*.
With more pictures. And videos.
* The great thing about Japan is that it is impossible to tell in advance whether that phrase means "robots used as sex toys," or "robots made out of sex toys." Knowing Japan, it's even possible that it could refer to sex toys designed for robots.
I have been very sick this week. Fortunately — for me, at least — Fan Fiction Friday represents an excellent opportunity for me to Share the Pain by making you sick, too.
You have been warned.
Let's start off on a relatively inoffensive note, with Something Positive (now there's a sentence I've always wanted to write). R. K. Milholland already did a couple of crossovers of his own, with Aeire's now-completed Queen of Wands (currently in re-runs). However, as far as I can tell, even he never wrote a Something Positive/Queen of Wands/InuYasha crossover.
Of course, that's nowhere near as odd as the thought of slashfic involving Professor Snape and the Witch-King of Angmar, is it?
Still, if we want to truly peg the outrage meter all the way over in the red, we're going to have to go try a little harder. We're going to have to explore the bizarre world of Elfen Lied fan fiction comics.
Elfen Lied is a manga and anime series about the hunting, mutilation, and torture of humanoid magical creatures called dicloniuses (as the name implies, they have two horns on their heads). Obviously, as you no doubt expect, it's a wacky romantic comedy. And it's that same schizoid intensity that drives Nana's Everyday Life right over the Cliffs of Insanity in Thelma and Louise's car, vommiting little mindbombs of gleeful despair in every direction on the way down. It is the comic that caused the normally imperturbable Warren Ellis to exclaim, in linking to it,
I don't know what this is or who did it, but I think I have to quit writing comics now.I cannot defeat the horrible, life-exterminating glory of this.
Because you can never have too much Enterprise, a couple of quick hits:
First, there's the widely passed around Toronto Star article about the fan campaign to save Enterprise, and how it compares with other fan campaigns in the past, and, to a certain extent, whether there is any point in saving Enterprise.
The article discusses what fans ask of a show, what they demand of a show, and what they give a show in return. And the Star talks to former Toronto resident Jolene Blalock, who has never hesitated about sharing her opinions of the show (Money quote: "I mean, we started out with 13 million viewers on the pilot, and we somehow managed to drive 11 million of them away."). On the other hand, she has been just as vocally enthusiastic about the quality of the scripts and the direction the show has taken this year under Manny Coto.
Ah, but then there's the last stumbling block: When the news broke that Enterprise had been cancelled, I noticed, buried in the coverage, that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga were going to write the finale. Uh-oh, I thought, along with everyone else who noticed that little infonugget. And sure enough, the Toronto Star article seems to validate my darkest fears in that regard:
There is an awkward silence when the subject of the final episode is broached. "I don't know where to begin with that one," [Blalock] finally stammers. "The final episode is ... appalling."
Well, Wednesday's also gone and spoiled my big Monday Media Madness news, leaving me with no other option than to write you a review, albeit a fairly spoiler-free one.
Using special remote viewing skills I learned from my dear friend Nino Savatte at the Institute of Electrical Shocks and Psychic Surprises, I watched the episode in question.
And? It was pretty damned good, actually.
There were a few wobbly bits, and the incidental score was somewhat cheesy and intrusive during the action scenes, but on the whole, it left a favorable impression. As in the Paul McGann movie, or the first John Pertwee episode, the Doctor arrives on the scene without a companion. Another similarity to Pertwee's "Spearhead from Space" is that we don't get to see the Doctor's transformation sequence; yet clearly, from his behaviour, he has just regenerated. We get no explanation of why this has happened; indeed, were it not for the typical post facto preening about his new appearance, there would be no hint at all that he had just regenerated. Perhaps it happened a few days earlier, and he was still getting used to his face.
At the very least, we can assume that it was a fairly well-ordered regeneration: Unlike, say, poor Colin Baker's Doctor, he seems in full command of his wits from the very first.
That very first, for what it's worth, doesn't come until several minutes in to the episode. Instead, we are introduced to Our Heroine, Rose, at the start of her morning. The first five minutes or so take her through a typical day as a shop girl at a second-tier department store in London, and are much more like Bridget Jones's Diary or a Mike Newell film than they are like any previous episode of Doctor Who ever.
Pretty soon, though, the plot kicks in to gear, and the tone gets a bit more Guy Ritchie. There's some lovely action sequences (modulo your appreciation for BBC special effects, of course), a nice shift of gears back into domestic comedy, and then the horrid action music starts up again, and we're off.
On the whole, the pace is reasonably brisk; indeed, seasoned Doctor Who fans may find themselves curiously upset at the fact that the whole thing wraps up so quickly. Mind you, all of the setup that needs to be done gets done: We are introduced to the new Doctor, the new Companion, and the same old TARDIS (nice touch: Rose does not know what a Police Call Box is). A couple of juicy hints about larger matters are slipped in to the proceedings, and a good time is had by many (though not all) of the participants.
On the other hand, the amount of plot involved was just about the bare minimum required to achieve those goals. The result is an episode which seems only barely longer than "The Sontaran Experiment" or "Black Orchid", and which features at least four or five fewer plot twists and reversals of fortune than one would expect from a Doctor Who episode.
Hopefully, future episodes will return to the larger canvas and longer format that worked so well for the first twenty-some odd years of the show. And hopefully, they will get some more effective incidental music before "Rose" airs for real.
In the meantime, I'm going to have to remain intensely jealous of those individuals who live in countries where this show will actually be broadcast.
In my collection of potential blogfodder is a folder called "Scary Humans." The links contained therein pass the time in fitful slumber, waiting for the hour of their need.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of them had been awakened already by the web-wise wiles of Wednesday White. Curses!
Well, I guess there's nothing for it, then: I'm going to have to release its companion piece to the world at large. Because, after all, if you screw around with your eyes, you're going to need some glasses.
Today's Fan Fiction Friday installment is one of the stranger bits of fan-produced fiction around. It exists on multiple levels: As an adaptation of a well-known fantasy novel; as an expansion upon that novel; as a commentary on the novel; and as a couple of naked chicks in bed.
Those of you who live in San Francisco may know what I'm talking about: Heatherly and Julie's Fantasy Bedtime Hour, which features the literary criticisms of Our Heroines, Heatherly and Julie, as they read and discuss Lord Foul's Bane.
In bed.
Naked.
Four pages at a time they go through the book, despite being "ill-equipped to handle fantasy novel concepts." To help them along the way, a variety of different experts on the book hop into bed with them and answer their questions. In addition, Heatherly and Julie also direct short dramatizations of the book which help them demonstrate their grasp of the material.
So far, they're up past page 300 somewhere already; and the best part, for those of us who don't live in San Francisco (or Portland, Maine); is that the first twenty-two episodes are available for download, at a heady 64 megabytes or so of Quicktime goodness apiece.
New Scientist is reporting on a controversial new weapons system being developed and tested by the Office of Naval Research and the Universities of Florida and Central Florida. The weapon is a laser system designed to cause a burst of superheated plasma when it hits a target.
So far, so good, of course; that's pretty much what all high-powered lasers would do. It's also why lasers designed to cut through things have to be pulsed: The plasma cloud at the point of impact tends to interfere with the laser beam otherwise; pulsing the laser allows the plasma to disperse in between "shots."
With this laser, however, the burst of plasma is the whole point of the exercise: The expanding plasma carries an electromagnetic pluse across the body of the person on the receiving end, triggering intense sensations of pain. The design parameters are for the weapon to cause excruciating pain to a target up to 2 kilometers distant. Between the EMP and the force of the plasma burst, it is expected to be able to knock someone to the ground and leave them writhing in pain without permanently injuring them.
This is not the only such project under development: Taking a slightly different tack, DARPA is working with an Indiana company called Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems to create what has been described as a "wireless taser" which shoots a column of plasma at a target, and then uses that column of plasma to conduct the electrical charge. Future versions are expected to use — wait for it — lasers to ionize the air between the gun and the target before zapping the electric charge down the column of ionized air.
These weapons are all supposed to be non-lethal; they are primarily designed for crowd control. Critics, however, are understandably concerned about the fact that the job of the Florida researchers appears to be one of carefully figuring out how to make the EMP as painful as it possibly can be. The idea of doing controlled experiments whose purpose is the infliction of maximum pain on the subjects certainly does have a certain air of Josef Mengele to it; and many experts on pain have serious doubts about the non-permanence of the damage involved.
In the meantime, though, it looks like weaponeers have managed to create something which has always been considered purely science-fictional: A laser which can be "set to stun."
