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.
3 copies of Maya 2.5…
Still working on the T-Con report. At least I have my e-mail back.
Felt very good this morning when I got on the road to work. Warm temperatures, a sunny morning, and some good news last night all cheered me up.
I can get a bit manic when I’m in a really good mood. I’ll feel like there’s no problem I can’t handle, and sometimes I get a little foolhardy. But I suppose it’s a better state of mind than the “I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed” mood I can fall into so easily.
Back to cataloging software. I hate paperwork.
Finally, spring
I have a long Technicon report I’m working on. For now, I’ll just say that the sun is shining, the air is warm, and we have ducks and bunnies in our front yard. Yay for spring!
OTOH, Elfie’s mailserver is rejecting my password. So I probably have a few days’ worth of mail on hold right now. 🙁
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.”
—–
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!
