I play lead for “Rocketship X”
Guitar Hero II arrived in my house this week, thanks to the lovely raininva‘s observance of my birthday. Now, I haven’t had a lot of free time on my hands, and even my gaming is scheduled by priority these days, but ya gotta take some time out of the day to hold a plastic guitar in your hands and rock out to Cheap Trick, The Pretenders, and David Bowie. (I think some of our guests approved more of the Motley Crue and Danzig tracks, though.)
The game’s got a bit more realism than I’d like, though – Rain and I are developing blisters on our fret and strumming fingers.
The book – very little going on. I worked out some background changes to my universe which will allow for more sensible plotting and better conflict, but I’m still not real sure what the ending’s going to be. Clearly, this isn’t going to be done by the end of the month, but then I’m not that worried; I never expected it to. (The base universe is one I created round about 6th grade. It’s weird making changes to something that’s been mostly static in my head for 20-odd years.)
I have several episodes of Torchwood in my hands, but I haven’t finished watching the 2006 Doctor Who season – in fact, as of last night, I’m behind the SciFi Channel’s broadcast (it’s sitting on the DVR). Since I’m reliably informed that the series opener of Torchwood spoils much of the end of the Doctor Who season, this means I’ll have to wait a while longer to get my Captain Jack fix.
Apparently, Rising Star went extremely well this year. Kudos to Cathy and all how worked so hard to pull it off. I think many excellent decisions were made this year, and it bodes well for the future of the con.
I’m burning DVD data discs tonight in a desperate attempt to find clear space on my hard drives.
“Quick – put up some shelves.”
While watching the 2005 season finale of Doctor Who with Rain the other day, something struck me. The Doctor carries a tool he calls a “sonic screwdriver”. About the size of a regular screwdriver, this tool emits sonic (and perhaps other) waves which can manipulate small mechanical and electronic objects. It’s most commonly used as a lockpick, but it’s been shown as a welder / unwelder, circuit modifier, computer reprogrammer, medical scanner, and (on rare occasions) a screwdriver.
He started using it in the Sixties, in his second incarnation, and continued well into the Eighties, when it was destroyed by an enemy of the Fifth Doctor. Sources in the BBC production team revealed that the device was causing the writers trouble when they wanted the Doctor locked up or otherwise frustrated by mechanisms. While I can’t remember if the Eighth Doctor used one during his movie, the Ninth and Tenth do so regularly, and I think with good reason. Someone at the BBC seems to have realized a fact:
Locked doors are boring story telling.
The sonic screwdriver is in fact a boon to the program: when there’s only 45 minutes of story, it’s a wise move to get past the locked doors and computer codes, and move on to the part where the Doctor must deal with other people and nasty decisions.
Besides, since the tool’s never too clearly explained, you can always have the door that the sonic screwdriver just won’t open.
(Brion Fields of Space Rogues keeps a sonic screwdriver in a pocket of his jumpsuit. Where he got it, I don’t know; and it was intended to be a subtle in-joke, not fill half the frame in an early scene.)
Getting it right
In the first episode of the 2005 Doctor Who series, Rose tries to find out something about this strange Doctor she’s met. Clive the conspiracy theorist tells her that he has one constant companion – Death.
Clive has a point. Though the Doctor usually prevents bad situations from getting much much worse, there’s no doubt that people drop like flies while he’s around, and that’s been the case throughout the 44-year history of the series. It’s strongly implied that just before he met Rose, the Doctor was partially (if, perhaps, accidentally) responsible for the death of his entire race.
So, for me, the scene in Friday’s episode where the Doctor begs the Chula nanogenes for one tiny miracle – one day where no one dies because he wasn’t a little faster, a little smarter, or a little luckier – is poignant as hell. Imagine the guilt that a compassionate man would carry after 900 years of not quite getting 100%, wondering if maybe he could have made it all work a little better.
Then, see the look on Eccelston’s face as this time he gets it right. For once in all his centuries, no one has died on his watch, and there are no horrors which are even partially his fault. Eccleston plays it beautifully, and maybe this is just a TV show, but it’s moved me every time I’ve watched it.
On the other hand, my geek cred is eroding a bit. 5 episodes into the new season, I haven’t managed to find time to watch even one of them. Oh well.
Return of the Doctor to these shores
The SciFi Channel doesn’t have a history of showing quality first-run material, though there are exceptions: “Farscape” and the Stargates come to mind. In a nice change of affairs, they have recently been broadcasting the new “Battlestar Galactica”, which despite initial doubts, soon won over large chunks of the geek populace. Heck, even though the new BSG is not really my thing, I’d watch it in a second over “Low-Budget CGI Monster Movie CLXI”.
Tomorrow night at 9 Eastern, they are showing the first two episodes of the new Doctor Who series. If you’re a Who fan, it’s probably already on the DVR, but if you aren’t, I strongly suggest you give it a try. You may have heard of “that weird British show with the scarf guy in the phone booth”, but this show bears the same resemblance to that as “Star Trek: The Next Generation” bears to the original “Star Trek” series. (Intentional comparison, as I have quite a soft spot for the ‘classic’ versions.) Now the stories come in one or two episodes each, not six half-hours of padding. The characters are much more fleshed out and three-dimensional, and even develop over the season. There’s even a late-season character who’s less discriminate than Riker about his bed buddies! And there’s a two-parter near the end of the season which may be the best 90 minutes of the Doctor we’ve seen since the show’s 1962 beginning.
Whovians: please watch or record it tomorrow. Many of us have seen bootlegs on the ‘Net, but the cable companies will read our DVRs and report back to SciFi – and the BBC is gearing up for season two.
People who dress odd
I suppose it’s not very convincing to call in sick when one’s already reported for work. Darn it. It’s nice out, and has been for the last couple of days.
An offhand comment about fashion (and the broken air conditioner in the typesetting room) led to my co-workers discovering I own a Utilitkilt. Now everyone wants me to wear it to work sometime soon – including my supervisors. (This is a workplace where one person has actually come to work in her pyjamas… so there’s not exactly a strict dress code.)
My jacket is currently sporting a button that reads “Paranoia, n. A healthy understanding of the way the universe works.” This made the day of a clerk at FYI Music over Christmas… apparently it hadn’t been a happy shopping morning. That same day, a customer in Red Robin went nuts over the “Team Banzai” emblem on the back of the jacket, and we spent about ten minutes swapping Buckaroo trivia.
Finally, I managed to watch “The Christmas Invasion” last night. That’s one of the darkest Dr. Who episodes I’ve ever seen. Someone makes a very nasty decision at the end, and though my knee-jerk reaction was to condemn it, I can sort of see both sides. I have to say that the new direction for the show impresses me… I never before expected to call an evening with the Doctor “thought-provoking”. I know I’ll be looking forward to “Torchwood” when that comes on. (Also because it’ll have Captain Jack Harkness in it.)
Trivia
I hadn’t realized until someone pointed out today that the actor playing Barty Crouch, Jr. in Goblet of Fire is the same person playing the Tenth Doctor in the 2006 Doctor Who series. But then, I can really be bad with faces sometimes.
Deep breath before jumping in the deep end
Grumpy me pokes his head out of his LJ cave and says, “write some stuff, it’ll help you get over yourself”.
I have a job interview tomorrow, and tonight I work a trial shift at a typesetting job. If either one of these jobs works out to a steady paycheck, I can stop sweating and resume planning for the future. I’ve been filing unemployment claims with the state for a month now, and haven’t seen check one, so things are pretty tight.
I’ve missed every summer con I wanted to go to this year because of money issues. Bleh. This is, of course, part of the general fan experience – not news to almost anyone reading this journal – but it’s still disappointing. I keep reading about cartoonists and gaming people who will be at DragonCon and grumping.
Moving my Doctor Who episodes over to DVD so I don’t have to drag around the laptop for showings; it’s a lengthy process, involving converting the episodes to DV streams, and then letting iDVD convert them back down to MPEG-2 files. Unfortunately I don’t have software that will skip the middle step. I hope the quality stays okay, there’s clear artifacting in the AVI files already. A friend pointed out that the first season never managed to get to an alien planet – only England, Utah, and a couple Earth-orbit space stations. I hope the second season’s more ambitious.
We watched Constantine a couple nights ago. It’s an okay flick if you don’t think too hard about the religious aspects involved… which, for obvious reasons, is next to impossible to manage. It’s not even that I disliked the movie, it’s just that I kept thinking, “But, but, but…” afterwards. It was also a shame that the movie was unable to rise above killing off the three obvious redshirts.
One thing is now clear to me in WoW; soloing sucks, partying generally rocks. This has of course been obvious to most of the players of the game for ages, but I am sometimes slow. Clearly I must bite the bullet (WoW does have firearms) and find more folk to group with on a regular basis.
Booklist: finished Eragon (N), Wizard’s Holiday (N), Debt of Honor – Tom Clancy (R), Just a Geek – Wil Wheaton (N), Catch Me If You Can – Frank Abagnale (R), First Lensman + Gray Lensman + Second Stage Lensman – E.E. “Doc” Smith (R), A Morbid Taste For Bones + The Hermit of Eyton Forest – Ellis Peters (R). I wish I could find my copy of Doc’s Galactic Patrol – methinks that I’ll need to start haunting used bookstores again, which is how I got the Lensman books in the first place. I have been putting off reading Chobits 6 because it’s been long enough that I’ll want to re-read the comic from the beginning, and I’ll probably also want to be able to afford 7 & 8 soon thereafter. BTW, I’d recommend anything on this list. Eragon especially was interesting to me by being remarkably unoriginal, yet well-written enough that I look forward to the next volume.
Oh, good lord, avoid The Reality Dysfunction. Nothing at all happens for 300 pages; dozens of characters are introduced and then left by the wayside; and then we start the lovingly, orgasmically detailed torture scenes of animals and small children. Really. I darn near threw the book across the room, and I certainly won’t be finishing it. My guess is that the author has serious issues to work out, but I don’t see any need to let him do so through me at $7 a book for a six-book series.
I’ll let everyone know how the job thing pans out!
A low-tech solution
In last Saturday’s Doctor Who, a spaceship has crashed somewhere in London, and the Doctor doesn’t know exactly where. His cunning plan is to ask around, but his companion Rose is disappointed in him: “Not very ‘Spock’, is it: just asking? I think you should do a scan for alien tech. Give me some ‘Spock’! For once, would it kill ya?”
If only Enterprise was still on, and we could somehow have a crewman refer to an alien as “one of those mindless killer ‘Dalek’-types”. Then the circle would be complete 🙂
You don’t know the power of the geek side…
Eric Burns, of Websnark.com:
“I’d like to go into depth on the Jedi philosophy, on the core of Hubris that led to the Fall of the Jedi Order, on the nature of denial and of ossification, and on the ways that Qui Gon Jinn represented, thematically, a break from all that in his methodology which led step by step to the next three movies and the redemption of the Jedi in the Expanded Universe. I would. And I’d like to show how David Willis has highlighted this succinctly. I even accept that if I did so, I’d never, ever get laid again. Somehow, this thesis would cling to me like lack of hygiene and even geek grrls would pause upon seeing me, say “well, no. Not him,” and move on.”
Instead, he just points us to this “Shortpacked!” comic. Which is freaking hilarious.
Oh, and I’ve stumbled upon a site with more remixes of the Doctor Who theme than any sane soul would ever need.
