This, That, and the Other.

Just some quick updates regarding previous postings.

Whatever book that's from.

Okay - the pivotal scene at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where the dragon fights the giant sea serpent/leech from Edmund's nightmares at the Isle of the Dark, where they've gone to find the last of the seven magical Swords of Aslan which will allow them to dispel the evil and rescue the islanders who have been sent as offerings to the Darkness? Very well presented in the movie version, I thought - which is probably good, considering that it doesn't have the least connection with the original text.

Doctor Who: The Next Generation?

"New teeth - that's weird."

David Tennant's first line as Doctor Who.

Ex-Doctor Who David Tennant is now engaged to girlfriend Georgia Moffett*, the woman who played his cloned daughter in a 2008 episode of the show and who is the actual daughter of another ex-Doctor Who, Peter Davison.  And they're expecting a baby. Forget new teeth, David, this is weird.

Fame is where you find it.

Writer and ex-coworker Annie quit her job a few months ago in order to work full time on her young adult fantasy novel.  Wow, imagine if she turns out to be the next J. K. Rowling and people flock to the posting on my blog to read her first interview!

Meh - somehow I doubt it will be enough to get me onto Oprah.

Fun for the whole family.

I somehow missed the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's grim post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Road when it was in commercial release, and had some difficulty finding it at a reasonable price after its release to DVD. (Odd how some movies never seem to get onto the 2 for $20 shelves at HMV. For example, District 9 has just now come down in price as well, but I'm debating going Blu-ray for that one.) However, as part of my holiday gift certificate purchases, I found a cheap copy at Amazon.ca and dropped it into my shopping cart.

Without reprising the plot, let's just say that the movie beautifully (if not completely faithfully) captures the desperate, nihilistic tone of the novel.  Okay, maybe "beautifully" isn't the right word here, but you get the idea.

If you can't say something nice.

And finally, words cannot express my pleased astonishment at having received a comment from Scott Francis, the author of The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America, on my posting about his book. Good thing my comments were positive!  But I think that it would be a salutary experience for everyone who's put their opinion of someone else's work online to have the object of their criticism reply in person. 

- Sid

* By the way, Ms. Moffett has huge geek cred - in addition to being a Doctor's daughter, The Doctor's Daughter, and the Doctor's fiancée and the mother of his child (perhaps his daughter), her mother, Sandra Dickinson, played Trillian in the BBC TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  As they say in Wayne's World, "We're not worthy..."

 

Virtuality 2: Fallout 3

Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?

William Gibson, Disneyland With The Death Penalty

To my surprise and disappointment, I've just reached the conclusion of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3, the current version of the Fallout game franchise.  Based on my reactions, you might think that I didn't enjoy the game, but my surprise and disappointment were at the fact that the plotline of the game had reached its climax - in my mind, I was far from finished playing. 

In the first post in this series, I mentioned virtual realities and the fact that millions of people now spend a lot of time immersed in some digitally manufactured world or another.  For the last couple of months, I've been one of those people as I crept through the wreckage of Washington DC in 2277, and wandered the blasted landscape that surrounds it.

Fallout 3 is set in a future that results from an alternative America, an America that seemed to have stopped developing culturally in the middle of the last century.  There's a 50's aesthetic to everything: buildings, weapons, robots, even hairdos.  It's especially noticeable in the wrecked cars that dot the landscape, which explode if shot, leaving behind a legacy of radiation - apparently they're powered by uranium rather than premium unleaded.  This design aesthetic is matched somewhat by the cultural feel of the game, with its rampant anti-communist sentiments and reliance on justice from the end of the gun.

In this world, it's a war in 2077 with the Chinese communists which has led to the downfall of society. The player controls a character who has been raised in a fallout shelter, Vault 101, but who leaves at the age of 19 to follow his father out into the unknown radioactive world outside.

And that was the part of the game that impressed me the most, the almost endless blasted wasteland that the area around Washington has become.

For any readers who are unfamiliar with the basic first-person shooter paradigm, the action generally takes place in what is generally referred to as a dungeon-based system, derived from the venerable Dungeons and Dragons tradition. It's basically rooms - admittedly, rooms of differing sizes and dimensions, with stairs or hills or elevators or windows or walls, but essentially rooms.  You walk in HERE, and you exit THERE.  Games like Halo have expanded the landscape, but essentially one follows the path laid out by the designers.  You kill everything in the way, find the exit, and you're on to the next set of rooms, never to go back.

Fallout 3 has its share of "dungeons" in the form of caverns, subways and buildings, but they're all part of a huge area known as the Capitol Wasteland.  The Wasteland is a vast, sprawling interface between locations, marked by burned buildings, collapsed freeways, pools of toxic radioactive waste, giants scorpions, and the occasional distant thud of a boobytrap explosive being triggered.

The scenery is marvelous.  The game takes place over time, and so the player sees the Wasteland at all times of the day, from dawn to midnight, and the lighting effects match all of these time perfectly.  If you come over the crest of a hill, the sun will get in your eyes and blind you, and the night time landscape is a flat mix of bluish grey that effectively conceals all sorts of dangers.  Dustdevils swirl over the shattered pavement, and the wind stirs the dried grass as you walk through it.  Streets and buildings are littered with the detritus of the American Way of Life:  lawnmowers, cups, empty bottles, and a thousand and one other items to be salvaged and sold for the currency of choice - bottle caps.

It's not an endless landscape, one does eventually discover the borders, and a critical eye will spot that there is a library of stock elements that sometimes repeat - note the identical mirror-image trees to the left in the picture above.  But even with its limitations, the Wasteland is an astonishing creation in terms of size, variation, and unpredictability.  Roving bands of mutants or raiders can appear at any time, and it's never possible to return to a location without the possibility that the enemies that were disposed of during your last visit have been replaced by new and different challenges.

The other element of the game that really set it apart for me is the moral compass that it presents. From the very early stages in Vault 101, every action and interaction, every choice and decision, has its consequences in terms of karma.  Are you polite or rude at your 10th birthday party?  Do you speak with Old Lady Palmer or ignore her to harass people for gifts?

This approach continues when you enter the outside world and are faced with more significant moral challenges. Most empty houses are unowned, and as such the possessions therein are up for grabs.  Enter someone's home or business, and you can still take things, but your karma diminishes and you may be shot by someone - or you can shoot them and take whatever you want.  If you find a bound captive after killing some cannibal mutants, do you free them or ignore them?

Apparently I'm quite a good person at heart.  I killed hundreds of people, but they were all evil.  I looted scores of houses and buildings, but they were all empty and ownerless.  I freed slaves, refused to become a hired killer, and gave water to the beggar outside of Megaton, the town built around an unexploded atomic bomb - which I defused to save the inhabitants from radiation poisoning instead of blowing it all up for 500 caps.

Having finished the game with a ranking of "Saviour of the Wastelands", I'm a bit tempted to go back and play it again as an absolute bastard.  If nothing else, I'd like to find out what the consequences are - it would sadden me deeply to discover that it really doesn't matter.

- Sid

 

"Like a bird watching guide...only for monsters."

“Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade.”

“A what?”

“A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears.” He burped.

“It assaulted her? How?”

“You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. ‘It was cold’”—he lapsed into his bad Southern accent—“‘and metallic.’ It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Woman’ and all those ‘Star Trek’ reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the polygraph.”

William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum

Every now and then my sister Dorothy sends me a book.  Now, as I've already said, my sister could probably write this blog (albeit a bit differently than I do) so as you might guess, she tends to send me things that relate to science fiction or fantasy.

However, she's also aware that I already have a fairly substantial stack of books, and although it's certainly not impossible to give me something that isn't there, you're certainly taking a chance if you decide to give me a book in hopes that it's something that I don't already own.

Dorothy has cleverly addressed this problem by sending me things that are a bit odd even by my liberal standards.  As an example, the most current entry in the sweepstakes is The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America, by Scott Francis.

I'll admit that I opened this book with a certain sense of sibling obligation, a sort of "Oh, well, I should give it a look" feeling.  To my surprise, I found it to be an interesting and somewhat authoritative guide to the various "hairy monsters, flying monsters, lake monsters and other unexplained phenomena" that inhabit the continent.

And it's a good solid book, 248 pages of information on creatures ranging from the obviously fictional, like the Sidehill Wampus, a hill-dwelling cat-like creature which has longer legs on one side to keep itself level, to the less explicable Lake Worth Monster, an aquatic man-beast that terrorized an entire beachful of people in Texas in 1969.  There's a plethora of serpentine lake monsters, all sorts of variations on Bigfoot, and any number of frog men*, gator men, lizard men, mud men and even skunk men.

The group term for these creatures is "cryptids" and although I'm a sceptic about these things, you do have to wonder what lies behind the innumerable cryptid sightings, encounters and in some cases attacks that are listed in The Monster Spotter's Guide.  As in the opening quote, are all of these things just semiotic phantoms of some sort, the modern equivalent of being spoken to by the Virgin Mary?  Or are some of them real, things that fall squarely into the Shakespearian "more things on Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy" category?

Personally, I stand my ground as per previous comments:  show me one.  There has to be some reason that all the entries in The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America are illustrated with line drawings instead of photographs.

 - Sid

* Sorry again, Laurie, still not Nazi frog men, these are the anuran variety.

Okay, 59.9 years, really.

 I don't know what the rest of you think about while doing cardio, but my mind goes off in all sorts of directions.  Today's session on the recumbent bicycle led me to the following train of thought.

(There's a bit of a spoiler here, but bear with me.)

In Tron: Legacy, part of the plot is a plan by Clu, Kevin Flynn's digital doppelganger, to take over the physical world.  In order to accomplish this, he has assembled an army of "repurposed" inhabitants of Tron's computer world that he plans to transfer into the real world, presumably by reversing the process that brought Flynn, and later his son, in.

Okay, so far so good.  Now, as we all know, the great debate regarding Star Trek's transporter is exactly how the damn thing would work in practise.  After all, if it converts the people on the transporter pads into energy, e equals mc squared tells us that you end up with the equivalent of a pretty good sized atomic bomb going off down there in the heart of the Enterprise, which has to be a bad idea.

In this case, we're looking at the opposite problem.  Would it not take all of the energy in the Los Angeles power grid to create the mass of a person?    Let's see...Los Angeles uses about 3.9 million KW a year...that's about 10700 KW a day...1 KW equals 3,600,000 joules, so that's 38,465,753,424 joules a day...one pound of mass is about a 10 megaton atomic explosion*...one megaton is 4,184,000,000,000,000 joules...a two hundred pound man would be about 836,800,000,000,000 joules...divide by joules per day in LA...divide by 365 to convert days to years...no, I'm out of my depth here, that can't be right.  I end up with 60 years of the entire electrical usage of Los Angeles to create just one person from scratch, let alone an entire army.

Remember the cascade failure that shut down electricity for the entire North East area from New York to James Bay in 2003?  Imagine Clu's digital forces making their way up the datastream to the basement of Flynn's arcade, as breakers across the state - and the country -  flare white hot and explode under the stress of attempting to feed the creation of physical forms for the invasion force...

But, let's be honest here.  Higher math isn't my strong suit - in fact, after a couple of pints, I sometimes have trouble figuring out the tip for dinner.  If any mathematically inclined readers of this posting would like to take a shot at calculating the energy involved, I will be happy to correct my figures.

- Sid

* There's some fuzz factor there, I found different kiloton yields for a pound of mass online, but ten made the math easier.

Virtuality 1: Tron 2

Wi-fi?  What's that?

Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy

I went to see Tron: Legacy last week, and I was surprised by my reaction:  I thought that it was a bit old-fashioned. 

This is an odd reaction to a cutting-edge 3-D CGI extravaganza, and so I came home and watched the original Tron, a comparison which I was certain would establish Legacy as the visual masterpiece that it must be.

Surprisingly, even with its 28 year handicap, I found Tron to be a better movie in many ways, especially when viewed in context.  In 1982, Tron was a groundbreaking state of the art special effects movie, although obviously state of the art has moved on since then, as it always does. But at the time it presented a unique and original view of a digital world, a view which in many ways offered the first metaphor for a visual representation of the world of bits and bytes.

But let's give some perspective to this picture.  In 1982 we were sitting in front of monochrome green CRTs and 8-bit colour displays, listening to the click and whir of single-sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. There were only primitive graphical user interfaces:  the first Mac had not yet been released, and the first version of Windows was three long years away.  Tron's special effects were created using systems with 2 MB of RAM and 330 MB hard drives - you can get a smart phone with more processing power now.

In spite of the limitations of hardware - in the end, only a very small percentage of the movie was actual computer graphics -  Tron showed us a world that none of us had ever imagined, or perhaps the world that we'd all imagined.  It represented an important landmark in our first fumbling attempts to establish a metaphor for the digital universe that was beginning to develop. 

So why doesn't Legacy represent an extension of that metaphor?  What's changed?

We have, or rather society has. People grow up in cyberspace these days.  Millions of people spend most of their free time on the game grid, people who operate digital avatars for hours every day.  Most of us neither know nor care what the physical location of anything on the internet might be - for example, I haven't the least clue where this blog is actually stored, nor do I need to.*  We work online, we shop online, we talk online, we date online - let's face it, we live online.

On that basis, Legacy left me with a bit of a "Yes, and...?" feeling.  It's a bit like one of those movies where explorers find a long-lost plateau in Africa which is teeming with dinosaurs.  Technically speaking, Legacy takes place in a closed single-portal system which has been churning away in isolation for over 20 years, 20 years of technological development in the outside world.  The prospect of the denizens of that system attempting to take over the real world is almost comical, like the idea of being attacked by a basketball-sized 8-bit Pacman while walking down the street.

Now, I don't want to make any claims that Tron is the virtual equivalent of Gone With The Wind in terms of moviemaking.  Even at the time, I doubt that anyone considered it as a nominee for Best Movie at the Oscars.  But visually, conceptually, it did what science fiction is supposed to do:  it showed us a "what if" world, a world that didn't exist, but which could exist, which might exist.

Legacy?  I don't mean to suggest in any way that the effects in Legacy aren't well done (or that it's any more deserving of a Best Movie nomination), but their representation of cyber-reality certainly didn't offer a unique view of a digital universe, just a more expensive view of the universe that Tron had already shown us. In fact, the combination of lighting, sets and costumes made it look like nothing more than an extended commercial for the next really big male body wash of your choice.

- Sid

*  Have you ever wondered where Google™, Facebook™ or eBay™ actually are, in the real world?