Mental clutch not engaging

Uggggh…

Brain is not working this morning. I am slow and stupid. Caffeine not helping. I just pray I get through the morning without embarassing myself too much.

I don’t know what the problem is, I ate well yesterday and got 6 hours of sleep last night (okay, interrupted once or twice by the cat, but I thought I was used to that by now).

Failed to dodge a spoiler yesterday for “Revenge of the Sith”, and it’s disappointing. From all I hear, the movie’s going to be quite good, but I’m disappointed that they chose to include this one little detail.

Last week’s Enterprise, however, was all style, no substance, and yet it rocked. You don’t need things to make sense when you’re having this much fun. The last 6 minutes especially… oooh, nerdgasm. The 8-year-old fan in me was royally entertained. Can’t wait to see tonight’s; at least the show’s going out fighting.

Last night I was eaten by wolves.

My guest pass has expired, so I went and purchased a retail copy of World of Warcraft, and am now an official player. I finished a quest or two last night, but didn’t quite level up: I think most of my friends who play will easily outstrip my progress, though I approve of Blizzard’s “resting bonus” for leveling that combats that a bit. That’s one of the reasons I’m playing: because so far the program is everything I’d want it to be. Everything makes sense and is working the way it ought to, even without the manual beside me, and it feels as though they’ve worked their butts off to make the game accessible and entertaining!

There are piledrivers working in the lot just behind my workplace. They aren’t doing the ‘clangy’ noise as much as ominous, building-shaking thuds. I now have a reference to the sound effect of a marching BattleMech.

The compelling thing about the new Doctor Who series so far isn’t the plots – standard stuff, for him – but that the creators are really focussing on how the Doctor’s presence affects those around him. They’ve touched on what it’s really like to step from the TARDIS into a strange time and place; how a Companion’s friends and family worry when their loved one disappears; and why the Doctor needs a traveling companion almost as badly as he needs his time machine. After 40 years of the show, it’s great to get a little bit inside the heads of the characters in the center.

Oh, and next week we get a Dalek 🙂

Generic “Fan Complaint Form”

Stolen from Slashdot

and placed behind a cut

Not a large tax base

From an Associated Press story:

“Newly sworn-in President Alfredo Palacio, who was vice president under Gutierrez, installed members of a new Cabinet Thursday in an effort to bring stability to the South American country of 12.5 people.”

12.5 people? Tell me that’s not a banana republic. i think I’ve ruled bigger countries than that.

daaaaahh dah-dah peanut butter…

There is a pipe-and-drum corps outside my window playing “Scotland the Brave”. They’re pretty good, too! That’s a kind of music which is 100x better live. Some of the lady pipers are only slightly bigger than their instruments. Again today, it’s sunny and warm and a perfect day for this… makes it hard to go back inside and do work. (So I’m blogging about it instead.)

I’m unavoidably reminded of the Northwind Highlanders from the Battletech universe. They had a habit of advancing on an enemy while playing bagpipe music over the external audio of their tartan-enameled mechs, and marching the 20- to 100-ton machines in lockstep to the drumbeat. Many an opponent quailed and ran away when faced with this 🙂

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Standing Mode

raininva and I watched Robot Jox this weekend – I hadn’t seen it since the early nineties. I liked the mech designs better than I did when I first saw it, and Gary Graham’s an old genre friend now (once considered for Captain Sisko, according to the IMDB). But the script is still ungood. My favorite bit is still the one where the bad guy uses a prohibited ranged weapon during a match, causing the death of hundreds of spectators, and the referees just shrug and say “do-over!”

Contrast this to Gunhed, which has a cooler mech and more interesting characters, but is confusingly edited and is willing to let the audience make up their own explanations for a bunch of plot points. There was enough left unanswered in that flick that I was easily able to steal the whole plot for a Shadowrun game without giving too much away to the players. Still, I prefer it.

I’m trying to make a mental list of live-action “giant robot” movies that are worth spending 90 minutes or so on. Iron Man #28 looks good, but I don’t know if it will ever be dubbed or subbed. And though I love it for camp, I’m not sure I can bring myself to include the first Power Rangers Movie.

Speaking of such, I’ve procured the Cutey Honey live-action flick, which will go into the “to be watched” queue after the latest Orion Slave Girl episode of “Enterprise” and this week’s “Doctor Who”. The movie’s looking very cheesy, which of course is just what I’d be looking for.

The other serious Whovian at my office wants me to bring in the Whoman DVD that I still owe rubinpdf money for. I will do so. He has been warned 🙂

Booklist: I re-read Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, and am trying to finish his Beyond This Horizon, but the latter’s just not grabbing me. OTOH, the local library had a hardcover of Larry Niven’s Ringworld’s Children, which I’m enjoying much much more than The Ringworld Throne. It’s feeling more like SF than the “fallen-civilization fantasy” that Niven admittedly loves, but I think is a bit mined out. I’ve got another nonfiction library book on the OSS to read after that.

Wow. This got long.

Luna and Battle-Cat are dating

Quote of the day, from websnark.com: “We watch He-Man, Sailor Moon, and other magical girl shows for the stock footage and the monster smiting.”

Now I will have Shojo Universe Master He-Man running around in my head all day. “Greyskull Power Sword Transform!!”

Things I am thankful for today: The alarm clock did not wake me from the midst of a dream, so my head actually made it into second gear by the time I had to drive a car. My body kept trying to slip back into reverse, though. Also, it is sunny today and going to be 70 degrees. I need that right now.

Quick review of the Duran Duran concert from the 8th, before I let it slip any further: That was one excellent evening, and I can’t thank stephaniesmom enough for giving me her extra ticket. It was absolutely worth leaving Fairfax at midnight to drive home. They performed every 80’s song I liked, not just the hits, and some of it was interestingly remixed a bit for live performance. We even had pretty good seats! The only downside was that my ears were quickly overloaded by the concert speakers, as usual, so it was a lot easier for me to follow the lyrics of the familiar 80’s material than the newer stuff. And boy, was I tired by the time I got home!

Epic Storylines

While thinking of sf/fantasy movies & TV today, it occurred to me that they’re all more ‘fun’ if the fate of humanity hinges on the outcome. That’s hard to do in episodic TV, of course, but Babylon 5 managed it, Deep Space Nine managed it, and Enterprise picked that up by its third season.

It’s in all the fan favorites; The Original Series and The Next Generation didn’t do it often, but when they did (“City On The Edge Of Forever”, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Best of Both Worlds’) It was memorable. The best Trek movies did this: Khan had to be prevented from getting the Genesis Device; the Whale Probe had to be silenced; the Borg had to be prevented from disrupting First Contact).

Of course, the original Star Wars trilogy let us know practically from the opening crawl that ‘humanity’ (i.e., the Rebellion and a pair of leftover Jedi) was gambling everything on Anakin’s twins; and in The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship knew that if they screwed this up, Middle-Earth was lost. Indeed, in SDF-Macross, the heroes almost blew it, and vast populations of human beings didn’t live to see the end of the series.

This may have been part of the problem with the new Star Wars trilogy, and the first two seasons of Enterprise. There was just no urgency in what the characters did, since we knew, in broad strokes at least, what the eventual outcome was going to be. You can make up for that with compelling character drama, but we didn’t get that either. (I know that Enterprise had a “Temporal Cold War” going on, but it was dull as dirt. We didn’t care until the Xindi zapped Earth.) Voyager eventually became character-driven and somewhat interesting, but might have had far better legs in the beginning if it had tried the Space Battleship Yamato / B5: Crusade formula and had to deal with an urgent need to get home ASAP – whether or not their technology was initially up to it.

Perhaps that’s something the writers of Trek Series 6 should think about. (I don’t doubt there will be a Series 6, next year or 10 years from now.) Make us worried, maybe not from the first episode but before too long. Make us feel like the leads are fighting not just for themselves, but for us or our kids. Give us an investment.

I bet we fans will eat it up.

Technicon 2005

I’ve always liked Niven’s Laws. I don’t slavishly agree with them, but they are an excellent source of topics to ponder.

This leads to the fact that I’ve just deleted a lengthy rant about SF/fantasy fans who, despite entreaties from their favorite authors that they start thinking for themselves, are still want to be told what to think and what to believe. The only thing we humans got that the rest of the animal kindgom didn’t is a more complex brain. It’s way past time that we as a race consider trying out some of its higher gears, just to see what happens, you know?

Ok, wow, Technicon report, cool.

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