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 🙂
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.
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.
