A perfect combination of human and Sadinger genes
Start in 1993. Take some anime fans who’ve just found an awkward, stilted translation of the script for one of their favorite flicks. Add some expensive non-linear editing equipment that one of the fans was pretty good with. Throw in an evening’s recording session in an echoey downstairs rec room, and I give you: The “Project: EDEN” Fandub! (Well, clips of it, anyway. And, SPOILER, they do give away the ending.)
Some of the fun stuff: none of the voice actors seemed to be able to pronounce “URDAS” (the Eastern Bloc-styled colony) the same way twice. In some of our early takes, David Arthur’s redneck accent was so thick, we thought we might still have to subtitle him. I spent days trying to figure out that the script we’d obtained kept saying “three-level bug” when it meant “trilobite”. Professor Wattsman’s squeaky voice nearly wiped out my throat for the evening.
Honestly, the best voice actors that night had to be Jerry Conner, Beth Lipes, and Cindy Arthur (now Jenkins). Good thing we made them our leads. Jerry did an incredible job editing together what he had to work with, and I think we all gained new respect for those eighties anime dubbers who were just trying to end up with something intelligible on a limited budget.
Of Phasers and Sabers
My enforced vacation from work brings some good news: some personal projects have moved much farther forward in the last month. I finally repaired Thunderchild, made progress on a video project, reorganized bookshelves in the bedroom and living room, and now I’ve finished a pair of games sitting in my collection since 2004: “Star Trek: Elite Force 2” and “Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast”. (Yeah, I really burn through the games, huh? This is why, despite my love for a good computer game, I don’t buy them very often.)
“Elite Force 2” is the second game where you take on the role of leader of Voyager‘s Hazard Team, a group of highly-trained survival and combat specialists. I love this concept in Trek, as it suggests that Starfleet knows you need folks like these sometimes, without suggesting that the fleet has an entire militaristic arm waiting for warfare. Had the idea existed when I was on Pathfinder or Yeager, I’d have lobbied for this to be added to our roleplay.
Unfortunately, while the game is prettier than the previous one, and contains more play time, the writing is weak compared to the first game. “Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force” had a script and plot superior to many televised episodes of Voyager (faint praise, eh?), but this sequel consists mainly of grinding one’s way through waves and waves of “Alien” clones. I was particularly offended by the redemption of an alien scientist who causes the gruesome deaths of thousands (including many of your crewmates and often almost you) through vain dreams of power and the affection of a girl, but eventually says he’s sorry and all is forgiven. Ever notice how, in post-DS9 Trek, the heroes are always punished for poor choices or bad luck, but the antagonists generally aren’t?
The Dark Forces franchise has held up a little better. While Mac users had to skip the second game in the series due to a lack of interest in a port, both “Dark Forces” and “Jedi Outcast” take the player back to the days of “A New Hope” and “Empire” far better than anything George Lucas has written in the last decade. The developers produce expert recreations of both specific locations and places hinted at by the movies, the sound effects and music cues immediately evoke the original experience, and even the short romance subplot in the more recent game is handled far better than the prequel movies do. I won’t lie – I found “Outcast” to be quite difficult, but worth my patience.
Instead of space bugs, you’ll face Stormtroopers of the Imperial Remnant left over after the death of Emperor Palpatine. A fallen Jedi has tired of the Light Side, and has allied with the Remnant to produce – well, let’s just say you’ll need to learn those lightsaber skills. Much fun.
Now, I need only finish “No One Lives Forever” and “Tron 2.0”. Probably won’t be soon, because I do have several more interesting things on my plate than shooter games…
We must be strong and brave
One day years ago, I was listening to Jeff Wayne’s excellent musical version of “The War of the Worlds”: specifically, the stirring sequence where the ironclad Thunderchild manages to destroy one two Martian War Machines before being sunk. Suddenly, my brain cross-linked it with the premise of the “Space Cruiser Yamato” series, where humanity builds a gifted spacefold drive into the hulk of the World War II battleship, and thus was born the idea for the ether flyer Thunderchild.
Miraculously, I found the rare model kit of the ironclad featured on Wayne’s album cover, and combined that with unused interior detail pieces from a Yamato kit. Plane, helicopter, and mecha bits from the parts box joined the fray, and I even added lights from a craft store set. The result won a couple awards, and praise from modelmaker David Merriman, but repeated changes of domicile took their toll on that poor creation. Soon, the ship the Martians couldn’t keep down was in pieces in my closet, and only grainy scans of lost photos remained to show all the hard work.
Well, Commodore Professor Coalsack’s creation has risen again, like an unstoppable movie franchise. A good friend will soon be taking some high-quality photos for me, but who can wait? I give you the mostly repaired Thunderchild! The pictures are clickable for a closer view…
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Kitbashed Thunderchild model, profile Until recently in pieces as a result of too many changes of residence, this is the repaired ether flyer Thunderchild. Several of the small guns visible at this angle have lost their barrels and still need replacements. For some reason, the large solar accumulator sail always looks bigger in photos than it does in real life. |
Click for more steampunk goodness
Recursive Discordianism
I’m trying to decide whether or not to post my Alice costume up on cosplay.com. I’ve been looking around the site, and it looks like crossplaying *without* making any attempt to pass is pretty damn rare. Like, I can’t find anyone else.
Why is it that even when I’m being weird, I have to be different?
The Science of Doctor Who: s01e03, “The Unquiet Dead”
For the first time in the new series, the TARDIS heads into the viewers’ past. Because of this, there are only two science-fiction concepts in the story: a “space-time rift” and energy beings who can inhabit gas clouds and dead human bodies.
The Cardiff Rift has been described as a wormhole, a gateway, a place where disparate parts of space and time meet, allowing beings and objects to travel from one part to another. While wormholes are solid scientific theory and not seriously challenged, they are also transient, unstable, and not big enough to send a water molecule through – much less a complex construct such as a mind or a body. On the other hand, these are certainly staples of science fiction; there would be no DS9 without them, just to name one example. So it’s realistically bad science, but like FTL drives, we can probably wave that issue away.
The energy beings are another common SF trope, but one where I have trouble suspending belief. Setting aside any question of souls, here on Earth, a person’s mind needs a brain and a body to inhabit. Computer software needs hardware on which to run. A radio signal needs a transmitter to generate it, and a receiver to play it back; none of these ‘information patterns’ interface with our world without using something physical. Otherwise, it’s like trying to pull spaghetti out of the pot using the beam of a keychain laser pointer.
And a cloud of gas makes a poor carrier for information. Gas is random, disorganized, subject to disruption by currents and slight temperature variation. Try to use a gas cloud to store your financial spreadsheets, and you probably won’t be happy with the results for long. But the other option in the episode isn’t much better…
At first glimpse, the idea of the loose minds taking over corpses seems an obvious one – the original owner isn’t using it, right? But centuries of embalming technology has blinded modern humans to one fact: bodes decay. Shortly after death, various chemical processes in a body are no longer inhibited or controlled; it doesn’t take long at all before eyes are useless for seeing, internal organs are useless for digesting food, brain tissue cannot carry electrical charges, and muscles will no longer flex and pull. And embalming only disguises these processes, or sometimes makes them worse! A loose mind somehow settling into a corpse’s body would find itself extremely frustrated in short order, unable to use it for any of the most basic functions.
(Yes, this means that all zombie movies are complete BS. But no one watching a zombie flick cares, so we’re good.)
Now, it could be some sort of telekinetic puppetry, such as the Nestene Consciousness used two episodes ago. But specially designed plastic mannequins still seem to make better vehicles than decaying bodies. And again, what are the Gelth aliens using to generate the telekinetic forces? The Nestene at least had a giant organo-plastic brain to work with.
In summary, we’ve got two almost certain impossibilities. Both of them are common in SF, so not many folks are probably going to get hung up on either, but they are bad science nevertheless. And in an unrelated note, why can’t the aliens ever just ask for help? The Doctor would bend time and space to help out if they just asked nicely. Stupid aliens.
The Science of Doctor Who: s01e02, “The End of the World”
Of course, I say “every day or two” and immediately, life keeps me from paying much attention to any writing for a while. That, and I needed to find my archive copy of the episode to check out a few details.
This go-round, the main science-fiction idea is that the Doctor has taken Rose forward five billion years or thereabouts to watch the Sun engulf Earth. (It’s a little morbid, but then the death of homeworlds is weighing on the Doctor’s mind these days.)
The timing’s about right, and Rose shows off some basic science knowledge when she points out that a) this should be a slow event over epochs, not an afternoon’s happening, and b) the Earth’s continents should be wholly unrecognizable now due to plate tectonics. Good for Rose! The Doctor glibly responds that gravity satellites have been holding back the sun today, and –
Wait. Wow. The technological civilizations of five billion years from now have the ability to keep dead stars from expanding. I mean, sure, no problem, five billion years; but an understanding of physics at that level implies they can do almost anything with energy and matter that they want, to the point where the space station and shuttles displayed would have to be utterly rustic and quaint. Maybe the whole ceremony is a bit of a LARP, like visiting Colonial Williamsburg is for today’s Americans.
– and that the “Trust” put the continents back as they were five billion years ago, for some sort of aesthetic reasons. Again, I guess since those are basically the continental shapes upon which Humanity evolved and reached the stars, perhaps it’s some kind of nostalgia thing. On the other hand, Earth’s continents aren’t a sliding tile puzzle. Much of the familiar coastlines, mountain ranges, and other geographic features would have been erased by time, and the Trust would have had to reconstruct them from scratch. (But hey, they can keep dead stars from expanding, they can do that too.)
This is not really a scientific observation, but comments of the Doctor’s and Cassandra’s later imply that the economy of the galaxy is still capitalist. I can hardly say that’s impossible, but with the galaxy’s suns pumping out free energy to anyone with a solar collector, and uncounted myriads of lumps of ice and rock and mineral wealth scattered throughout the arms for the taking, and the aforementioned technology levels: well, their version of capitalism must be fairly interesting.
Back to the science. Lady Cassandra. Yeah.
It’s kind of interesting how Cassandra moves her eyes and lips without any muscle tissue. Also, it’s interesting how her eyes pass information to her brain with no detectable optic nerve. (Our optic nerves are thick, obvious things not unlike organic coaxial cable.) Also, her mouth would be useless as a speaking device, since there is no jaw, tongue or vocal cords for making sounds, and there are no lungs to move air through her mouth so those sounds would be audible. Also… also… also… yeah. Lady Cassandra is, at best, a Disney robot puppet being manipulated by the brain tissue beneath. Too bad no one thought to put an automatic misting system on the frame from which the puppet’s hung. Oh, I guess it’s possible that she has nanotech implants for all this – again, the tech levels of this episode are rightly the tech of miracles – but it wouldn’t do anything for her already shaky claim of being ‘pure human’.
That’s a pretty ridiculous claim, anyway. The episode never says how old Cassandra is and the later “New Earth” doesn’t help, but we know from “The Empty Child” that humans began eagerly copulating with the rest of the galaxy’s sentients at least by the year 5,000. From the genetic viewpoint of the year 5,000,000,000, it’s a moot difference. She’d have be ‘pure human’ by some overly-specific and arbitrary definition she made up for the purpose.
Side note: it’s mentioned in one of her two appearances that she transitioned from male to female. By the year 5,000,000,000, one would expect that procedure to be so effortless and routine that people could change bodies like designer clothes if that was their thing. In fact, you’d really expect Cassandra in this episode to look completely like a prime specimen of 21st-century humanity; such a body could be re-spun from her DNA pattern (with desired tweaks) whenever the old one wore out… or just got boring.
So, the upshot is that I find the artificial compression of a star more convincing than Lady Cassandra. In science fiction and fantasy, sometimes the high concepts work far better than the baser ones.
Next time: an episode with, really, not a lot of science in it.
The Science of Doctor Who: s01e01, “Rose”
In 2005, Russell T. Davies brought Doctor Who back to television screens, and he did a wonderful job. The show’s ratings reached unprecedented heights, and our favorite Time Lord gained fans he’d never have been able to reach in the old days. Whovians never had it so good.
But one thing hadn’t changed in the years since the old show went off the air. Back then, most of the science in this classic work of British science fiction came from the magazine articles and the uncommon TV special on new discoveries in astrophysics. And that was okay, really. But this is the 21st century: there are science cable channels, science blogs, science celebrities, and the fairly accurate and up-to-date Wikipedia. Anyone writing for TV should be able to get at least the freshman science right, if only to give it lip service before violating it.
So here, I’m going to look at the science of individual episodes of the new Doctor Who. I’ll not spend a great deal of time on character or plot concepts in an episode unless, you know, I feel like it. And I may not worry too much about core concepts of the show like the TARDIS: like warp drive in Star Trek, if it’s BS, it’s BS upon which the series is built, so it gets a pass. And just because some science may be dubious doesn’t mean it’s a bad episode… unless the plot depends on the science in question…
So, “Rose”. The main science-fictional concept here is that a giant plastic alien brain is animating shop-window mannequins to terrorize the shopping malls of London. The episode doesn’t make this clear, but the Nestene Intelligence has been to Earth twice before in older episodes. In those attempts, it uses a ‘realistic’ puppet (like Mickey this time) to take over a plastics factory (Auto Plastics the first time), which it uses to make the dummies and ship them around the city; we have no reason to assume the M.O. is different this time.
This explains how a mannequin would have a gun hidden in its hand: the Autons have them built in when they are made in the factory. But the dummies seem to be otherwise just like ones used today, perhaps with different plastics that make them easier to animate. Based on the antics of the loose arm in “Rose”, we gather that the dummies don’t need any other sort of special organs – brain, individual muscles, consumption/storage – to do their jobs.
This suggests that the main Nestene consciousness is doing all the work remotely, controlling them telepathically and physically moving them with transmitted telekinetic force, like a child playing with hundreds of action figures at once. This fits in perfectly with the episode’s plot: the Nestene needed an amplifier array to blanket the city, and once it was defeated, the entire army collapsed like abandoned fashion dolls. Plastic’s a good choice, by the way, for animated puppets. Since plastic is composed of long chains of molecules, called polymers, one can imagine the chains coiling and relaxing like animal muscle to move the puppet around.
Telekinesis is a great science-fiction tool: since we have no evidence of anything like it existing in reality, a writer can have it function however convenient. We can use the laws of physics and biology to say a few things about telekinesis and telepathy: no one has yet suggested a method for such forces to be generated and received that has held up to experiment. Also, animals do not evolve the ability to generate directed radiation in the forms we do understand, since it’s always more energy-efficient to do your work in other ways: for example, communication by sound waves, or by color and motion, takes far far less energy than producing radio waves. There isn’t an organism on Earth that doesn’t have a limited energy budget. On the other hand, an advanced organism may find a way to add those abilities artificially to itself, so we’ll let the Nestenes have that one.
Finally, I do want to touch on a new attribute of the TARDIS: the outside doors. In the past, it was often implied that the TARDIS had inner and outer doors, with a mysterious discontinuity between them – mainly due to limitations on television effects technology. And the interior doors were generally portrayed as comfortingly massive. Now, the TARDIS appears to have a simple set of flimsy wooden doors between the console room and the universe, which would concern me quite a lot as a traveler. I think we must assume, based on the Doctor’s assurance that they’d resist “the hordes of Genghis Khan”, that either those doors are far more solid than they look, or that there’s plenty of super-science reinforcing and protecting them – or both. It’s fun to now be able to look into and out of the TARDIS whenever we want, so that’s good enough.
Next time: blah blah blah… and I feel fine.
We’re leaving Mother Earth…
This is NOT from the upcoming movie, but from a Japanese tie-in game. It rules anyway. If possible, click through and watch the HD version instead of the embedded one!
Starr, who’s currently unfamiliar with the Yamato franchise, said that the ship looked like the ether flyer Thunderchild to her. I took that as quite the compliment 🙂
