Movie thoughts etc.
Why couldn’t Watto take Republic credits? They’d have to be a pretty solid currency at that time. For that matter, why couldn’t Qui-Gon find someone who’d change his Republic credits over to Tatooine ones for a fixer’s fee? “Wretched hives” always have someone who can do this.
Message to the Wachowskis: I saw some of Revolutions the other day, and I’m sorry, but your movies make a lot more sense if Morpheus. Oracle, and Architect were supplying Neo with inaccurate / incomplete information, and Zion / the tunnels were simply another layer of the Matrix. This explains too much to be dismissed, no matter what you tried to sell us in movie three. Maybe what you told us “was true, from a certain point of view.”
I remain amazed at the Tolkien fans who feel that Peter Jackson did a poor job with LOTR. He pulled off a movie-making miracle, coherently filming a epic that the original author considered unfilmable, and in the process winning the hearts of both the general public and the Academy with a fantasy film. Sure, lots of us would have made a few different choices, but I don’t care to hear anyone say he’s a hack until they personally can produce something better.
Over the weekend, a friend made some excellent conjectures on who Harry Potter’s “Half-Blood Prince” might be. At least two of them could lead to very interesting storylines; the trick will be to not have it spoiled before I can read the actual book.
Rain got her PSP yesterday. I’ll say the first thing everyone else does – “Nice Screen!” She’s enjoying a couple of the games, too. With the default settings I found on the web, 30 minutes of video are ~200 MB more or less of a memory card, so at ~$100 for a 1 GB card, it’s clear we won’t be carrying around a fistful of pre-loaded feature-length movies.
I might head to the Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight. We’ll see.
Your Sci-Fi Friday
Yoda is clearly a much better teacher of the Jedi way than Obi-Wan Kenobi. One month with Luke, and Yoda had him ready to take out Darth Vader with a match-and-a-rematch; Obi-Wan had Anakin for, what, 7 or 8 years and never quite managed to teach him that “The vengeful destruction of entire communities is *bad*, dude.”
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Spaceship engines I have invented (or helped invent):
The Noodle Drive – powered by the reaction between pasta and antipasto
The Arel Drive – twisting space by the efforts of anime fans and Nihonjin exchange students trying to get each other’s consonants right
The Warped Drive – converting the libido of freshman college students to energy (still theoretical only, every piece of experimental equipment has melted or gotten icky)
Yes, most of these inventions did involve sleep deprivation.
Sixth World v4
So FanPro is going to release Shadowrun 4th Ed. in August. Since I never got around to getting much for 3rd Ed., this isn’t as painful to my wallet as it might be; and I’m not the type to go all “end-of-the-world” just because a game company changes a game I like.
Some notes from their blurb:
* The core mechanics are completely revised to be simpler and more streamlined for quicker, easier and more consistent play.
* Matrix 2.0! An all-new level of wireless “augmented reality” overlays the real world, unleashing hackers to be mobile digital wizards.
* The year is 2070 five years since the System Failure took down the old Matrix, nine years since the passing of the comet unleashed wild and unexplained magic in the world. The Sixth World has changed. Some of the players are familiar, but there are new faces – and new forces – at work in the shadows.
* Complete rules and world information in one volume playable the day you buy the book!
Simpler core mechanics? Uh-oh. After the oopses in 1st Ed., Shadowrun’s core mechanic became pretty dang easy. Simple enough to run fast, just complex enough to easily simulate various challenges and results. This seems a lot like fixing something that wasn’t broken.
IMHO, major Matrix changes have been desperately needed since 1st Ed. Deckers have never functioned well as part of their character groups, and the system bore little resemblance to any sane method for using computers. The Matrix has also suffered from the SF problem of reality quickly surpassing technologies proposed for six decades from now. A re-work is a great idea.
The Matrix goes down? I would think that in the mid-21st century, that would be just short of apocalyptic for world civilization. I mean, imagine today’s turmoil if every means of electronic communication failed for a few days… OTOH, major changes to a game world can be good for it sometimes, allowing new players to jump in and long-term players to get interested again.
One-book gaming: this is part of what sold me the original Shadowrun, back in the day. It helped sell me Paranoia XP, as well. I hate that if I want to buy any d20 game, I have to own a few 3.5th Ed. D&D books first. Good for FanPro!
I’ll buy it, I know I will. But as always, when I GM, I reserve the right to throw out the bits I don’t like.
(Of course, these opinions are my own and not those of my employer. But you probably could guess that.)
Space Thoughts
Ahh… a nice road-ragey morning. Rather than rant about it, though, I’m going to let it wash right over me.
After months of procrastination, I have cleaned up my office. There’s a four-foot-square floor-to-ceiling stack of boxed books and models in one corner, but at least I can use the rest of the space now. I look forward to getting a real computer desk to replace the wheeled cart I’m using at the moment.
Jo and her son Danny and I watched “Cosmic Voyage” last night, which was a updated version of the classic “Powers of 10” educational film plus some material on the ongoing history of the universe. It was narrated by Morgan Freeman, so you couldn’t go wrong. We were discussing the ‘life on other planets’ issue – with a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, it would be amazing if the intelligent life thing had only worked out one single time – and I brought up an article of faith on my part: cool science-fiction movies aside, any race which manages to reach the stars will have matured far beyond the desire to invade us, mutilate our cows, make circles in our fields, and probe our lower GI tracts. Jo pointed out quite correctly that we were close to reaching the stars, on a universal timescale, and we hadn’t matured to that level yet; my heartfelt response was that if the human race doesn’t put its house in order really damn soon, travelling to the stars will be quite the moot point.
I really could have sworn I had a lot more to talk about this morning. Maybe it was mostly the road-rage. Oh, well – if anything comes back to me, it’s not like I won’t be in front of a keyboard all day.
Fwip!
I got a forwarded email about ip addesses today. The subject line was “fwip”. This is brought to you by the Easily Amused Association.
I saw the screener for the new Doctor Who this week, and really liked it. The episode was fun, and avoided Fox’s mistake of trying to cram too much continuity down a new viewer’s throat – though there were a few tips of the hat to we long-term fans. I was going to post some specific opinions behind a spoiler cut, but I can wait until after Technicon to do that. I imagine that TV torrent sites are getting more queries on “rose” right now than the last time “The Bachelor” got pre-empted. I’m looking forward to more!
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately reading the archives at http://www.randi.org/ – some of the anecdotes are pretty wild. I can’t honestly say I’m likely to attain the level of skepticism displayed by Randi or the late Carl Sagan, but I did work out at an early age that there are a lot of charlatans out there waiting to take advantage of anyone they can. I’m a tongue-in-cheek adherent of Discordianism partially because it doesn’t want my money and would be disappointed in me if I started doing everything it told me to 🙂
Part of the fun of being Tech Support here is getting to play legitimately with the Developer Preview of OS X 10.4. Shiny beta plaything!
Spring Preview Day!
Beautiful day outside – 60 degrees already and supposed to top out at 70. While I wouldn’t diagnose myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder, I can’t deny that later sunsets and warmer temperatures help my mood a lot. With all the writing I’ve been doing lately about asteroid miners, I have to wonder what they’d do to deal with the problem of spending weeks, months, and years in an environment where it never ‘got light out’.
Finished re-reading Neuromancer and reading Soul Music this weekend. Soul Music was almost too light-hearted for a book dealing with the weariness of being Death, and the way that musicianship can change people. Also, if I understood the ending (and I don’t know that I did), there was a lot of ‘reset button’ hand-waving happening to avoid untidy loose ends. I suppose, on the Discworld, that’s not unreasonable.
One thing that’s never made completely clear in Neuromancer (partially because William Gibson didn’t actually know that much about computers (or so I’ve read)) is whether Case, the expert computer cracker at the center of the novel, is in fact a computer expert in any way. On re-readings of the book, he seems more like an experienced top-level “script kiddie” or video gamer than someone who can actually read or write any kind of code. Wintermute calls him “barely print-literate”.
Fun link today:
“Who’s On First” at the video store
Rodents and technology
http://www.livejournal.com/users/fantasygoat/41774.html
and
http://www.livejournal.com/users/fantasygoat/42319.html
Consider all the “computer mouse” jokes made.
Warning: these two are okay, but not all the pics in this guy’s journal are necessarily brain- or work-safe.
Stop buying our product so we can sue you!
It seems that the RIAA isn’t actually evil; it has just completely lost its collective mind. Apparently millions of dollars of pure profit every week, with no outlay of resources on their part, just isn’t enough…
