Attack of the Monoboob.

I come from the Net, through systems, peoples and cities, to this place: Mainframe. My format: Guardian - to mend and defend. To defend my new-found friends, their hopes and dreams - to defend them from their enemies.

They say the User lives outside the Net, and inputs games for pleasure.  No one knows for sure, but I intend to find out! 

REBOOT!

It would appear that summer has arrived on the West Coast, and as such, sunshine has once again become a familiar sight. As a result, I'm starting to walk downtown on Saturdays for lunch and some shopping.

Sadly, HMV has closed the doors on its flagship store on Burrard Street, so I've been forced to switch my DVD and Blu-ray shopping over to FutureShop on Granville.  This week I was pleased to see the collected Reboot! on the shelf for a mere fifteen dollars per two-season set, and without hesitation picked up the entire run.

Created by Vancouver's Mainframe Studios, ReBoot's 1994 debut on ABC made it the first fully digital commercial cartoon, preceding Toy Story by a full year.  (And, I might add, with six and a half hours of material rather than Toy Story's 81 minutes.)  For readers unfamiliar with the series, Reboot was built around the concept of computers as urban centers, virtual cities if you will, inhabited by binomes - the various bits and bytes that made up the operating system. The hero of the show was Bob, a Guardian tasked with defending a system called Mainframe from the various perils of game downloads (which, when won by the User, caused massive damage to the system) and viruses such as the evil Megabyte and his sorcerous sister, Hexadecimal.

Intended as children's programming, it was also loaded with geek references and computer jokes, ranging from the obvious, such as Megabyte, Hexadecimal, and Bob's love interest Dot Matrix, to the more obscure - did everyone realize that Enzo the boyish sprite was named after the initials of microprocessor flag bits? (Enable interrupt, Negative, Zero and Overflow.) Or Phong, the Command.com/mayor of Mainframe, who was named after a shading algorithm used in rendering 3-D files.*

The producers of ReBoot were surprised to find themselves in almost constant conflict with ABC, who demanded that Dot's bosom be less anatomically correct (ergo the infamous monoboob of the title), refused to let her kiss her brother on his birthday due to the sexual connotations (no, honestly), and, adding insult to injury, told the Canadian company that they had to remove a reference to hockey.

The end of the second season saw a parting of the ways with ABC, and a move to syndication. (And, as you'd expect, a more realistic bosom for Dot.)  It also saw improved animation and rendering, and an extended, more mature story arc dealing with Enzo's search through the Web for Bob, who was banished from Mainframe by Megabyte at the end of Season Two.  Season Three saw the end of the series as such, but there were two follow-up feature-length films that were broadcast in North America as a truncated fourth season.

It's great to watch the show again, and very gratifying to once again see the astonishing amount of creativity and attention to detail that made it so enjoyable for adults as well as children.  Ironically, the DVD episodes don't appear to be digitally rendered files, or if they are, they weren't rendered at DVD resolution.  My guess would be that they were either upsampled from lower resolution files, or perhaps transferred from some sort of digital video format.  

I wonder if the original pre-render files are still in existence?  Funny to think of them slowly eroding away bit by literal bit in some abandoned hard drive array or on backup tapes in a closet somewhere - in fact, that's actually very close to the final fate of Mainframe.  Sadly, if that has happened, it won't be possible to save those files as easily as Mainframe was saved in the series.

And how was Mainframe saved?  How else - by a reboot.

- Sid

*I've heard various theories regarding the provenance of Bob's rather prosaic name.  Wikipedia says that it's "likely" a reference to Amiga computer Blitter OBjects, but I've always fondly hoped that it came from Marathon, Bungie's 1994 Macintosh breakthough game.  There were cannon fodder characters in Marathon called BOB - Born On Board.  I guess it depends on whether the Mainframe team were Amiga fans or Apple believers.

Towel Day!

Good morning, everyone!  Do we all have a nice towel picked out to carry around today?  If you're looking for a local celebratory event, as always please visit towelday.org for an international listing of Towel Day celebrations.

It's interesting that there are any number of geek days that have broken the dam into popular awareness.  There's Pi Day (March 14), Star Wars Day (May 4), Towel Day (May 25) - which is apparently also Geek Pride Day, who knew - and Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19).

And, of course - Felicia Day:

Have a good day, hoopy froods.

- Sid

Update:  no other visible towels on the bus, sad that the faithful are so few.  However, two of my co-workers are also aware of Towel Day, which didn't make the process of explaining it any simpler, but did allow us to split it up rather than just me dealing with it on my own.

Tidbits II.

This can only end in tears.
We've hired a woman who can sneer and say "Star Trek" at the same time.

Just when you thought it was safe.
Yes, it's the movie sequel you've dreamed of, the followup to Piranha 3D - what else but Piranha 3DD.  Ms. Smith, who was responsible for me seeing the previous iteration in the series, has already issued an invitation to see the film, and I feel some kind of obligation to my blog - an oblogation, perhaps - to see just how much worse it could be.  (Actually, Laurie was kind enough - sure, let's call it "kind" - to send a link to the preview, for those of you with a morbid sense of curiousity:)

Everyone who would name their son "China" please raise your hands.
I finished Railsea, the new China Miéville novel that I bought at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, and sadly, it never quite made it for me.  My friend Colin also agrees that it lacks the kick of some of his other books. But I still don't think he should go back to the New Crobuzon series until he's ready to, too many sequels seem to have been written just to make a buck off an earlier success.

 "Charles always wanted to build bridges."

Length of Golden Gate Bridge:  8,981 feet.
Distance from Alcatraz to shore:  6,600 feet.   

Hey, that scene at the end of X-Men III would actually work!  (Well, at least in terms of distance.  Unless Magneto is supporting the bridge constantly, it couldn't stay up like that, that's not how suspension bridges work.)

Hey, they're doing the Trash Compacter at 1:20!
Again, how much worse could things get?  If you thought the Kinect Star Wars Dance mode thing was bad, look at this:

"We thank you for your patience."

"What we want to see before commercial operations is no surprises. We could reach no surprises relatively quickly or we could take a while to get there." 

Virgin Galactic Chief Executive George Whitesides

Although Sir Richard Branson was originally planning to take his first orbital flight by the end of this year, it was announced today by Virgin Galactic that they are expecting to finish developing their rocket engine "within a month or two".  That rather fuzzy timeline, coupled with the need for actual flight testing, will probably push commercial flights to the end of 2013.  (Which, let's be honest, may well mean the start of 2014.)

Wow - I've heard of flight delays, but this is ridiculous...

- Sid

P.S.  Just a reminder, froods, tomorrow is Towel Day!

Archeo-logical.

I'm currently reading Jack McDevitt's The Engines of God, which among other things deals with an archeological investigation of an extinct alien race. Although the archeological team has implausibly* managed to develop a partial knowledge of the alien language, they also rely on visual cues and dating techniques to establish developments and setbacks in the alien society.

At one point, there's a reference to the aliens losing some very basic knowledge due to dark ages at various points in their history, to the point of rediscovering twice that their world was not the centre of the universe. Really, thought I? I wonder if the later societies revere the earlier more accomplished cultures? This wouldn't require writing as a key - Western architecture owes a strong debt to classical Roman and Greek roots, via the British Empire and Napoleonic France. We also display frequent use of Roman numerals and Latin tags - again, information that could be observed and compared, rather than based on being able to read any of the words involved.

Later, they're examining an enigmatic alien structure, and one of the characters comments that "...you’d expect the central tower to be the tallest of the group. Not the shortest. They just don’t think the way we do.”  Part of the bias toward higher central towers in our culture is a legacy of our collective militaristic background. Castles are constructed with a higher central keep so that if the walls are taken by the enemy, the defenders can retreat to the central fortifications and still maintain the advantage of height.  Architecture with lower central features might well indicate a less bellicose cultural background.

Ha, maybe I should have been an archeologist - or a science fiction writer.

- Sid

* I'm sorry, but I'm completely sceptical about the possibilities of translating a completely alien language without some sort of Rosetta Stone.  For the alternative viewpoint, recommended reading is H. Beam Piper's short story Omnilingual, in which scientific constants such as the table of elements provide an initial point of access for translation.  Which might well work, but you'd be a long time figuring out Shakespeare from that.

Plus popcorn sales.

Here we are, the global financial situation is in a state of near-chaos, there's record unemployment in countless countries, and yet, and yet, there was enough spare money floating around for The Avengers to pull in an international box office total of over 1.25 billion dollars to date. 

Perhaps Greece should make a superhero movie.

- Sid

P.S.  Yes, that's right, the original 1963 lineup of the Avengers did not include Captain America, Hawkeye or the Black Widow, and Ant Man and the Wasp didn't make the cut for the movie.

The Other Change of Hobbit.

What I offered to do was to sit in the front window of a bookstore for a full week, and to attempt to write a complete story every day for six days.  The store I offered to do this gig for is the famous sf shop in Los Angeles, A Change of Hobbit....(We here in Los Angeles who work in the genre feel very protective about A Change of Hobbit, and we like to help out when we can.)

Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine

Okay, history lesson.  Many many years ago, back before Star Wars dragged science fiction kicking and screaming into the forefront of popular culture, being a science fiction fan was like living in a small town.  It was a relatively small community of writers and fans in which everyone sort of knew everyone else, or at least recognized their names when they appeared on a book cover.

And even though it was long long before Twitter™ and Facebook™ and their ilk turned everyone's lives into public events, it was easy to find out about what was going on just by reading editorials and letters to magazines and introductions to novels and so forth.  As a result, even though I was a teenager living on the fringe of northern Ontario in Canada, I was aware that there was a science fiction and fantasy bookstore in California called A Change of Hobbit, and later on some kind of related store called The Other Change of Hobbit.

Fast forward to 2012, and here I am on the BART train, headed north from San Francisco to Berkeley en route for The Other Change of Hobbit.  The original Change of Hobbit in Los Angeles has been closed for about a decade, and sadly, the Other Change of Hobbit web site indicates that they've been also having financial problems, and were in fact closed for six months, re-opening in March of this year.

I have to be honest and say that I wasn't very impressed by the store space itself, due to the plethora of banker's boxes blocking access to aisles and bookcases.  This may have been somehow related to the aforementioned money issues, but it made casual browsing a bit difficult.  However, the selection was good, and I was pleased to add a chapbook of Ursula K. LeGuin poetry to my collection, along with a couple of new paperbacks and an Ace Double.*

I was also pleased to meet the store cats, two affable shorthairs named Sam and Trouble. After some initial cautiousness, Sam concluded that I was a trustworthy sort and decided to hop up on my shoulders and ride around while I browsed. (We eventually came to a careful parting of the ways in the L section of the new paperbacks.)

Overall, I have to say that I preferred the genteel natural wood presence of Borderlands to the cluttered industrial feel of The Other Change of Hobbit.  Regardless, I hope that they successfully weather their monetary storm and keep their part of our collective history alive.

- Sid

* For those of you unfamiliar with Ace Doubles, I'm in negotiations with my sister about an explanatory guest posting.  Since these negotiations have been ongoing for the entire run of The Infinite Revolution, we may need to start discussing some sort of collaborative effort...

Zero hour nine am.

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket man.... 

Elton John, Rocket Man*

Do these things happen to me because I'm a science fiction geek?  I mean, if I was a big fan of, I don't know, cowboys or something like that, would I stumble across memorials to Roy Rogers or whatever every place that I went?

I ask because today I found a rocket ship in San Francisco.

I woke up this morning to clouds and fog, and a temperature that made me me grateful for my foresight in packing a sweater.  However, as I made my way downtown the clouds opened up, leaving the city with a flawless blue sky.

I decided to enjoy the changed weather by wandering along the waterfront and perhaps taking some pictures of the Bay Bridge, so I headed south along the Embarcadero.  To my astonishment, I immediately discovered a gleaming forty foot tall rocket ship à la Flash Gordon, complete with a posted route map and schedule.

To my intense disappointment, it turned out that it wasn't functional - damn shame.  If I thought that I actually had the option of catching the 11:17 to Pluto, I would have picked that over my Alcatraz tour in a flash.

(By the way, if you'd like more information about the Raygun Gothic Rocket, please visit http://www.raygungothicrocket.com for the full story.)

- Sid

* Geeks may prefer the famous William Shatner version over the original.

Gnomic statements III.

If that was Thanos, does that mean that Adam Warlock might be in the sequel?

- Sid

Much, MUCH bigger.

 

Borderlands employee:  Did you find everything?
Me:  Well, no, but I didn't expect you to have everything - I think you'd need a bigger store for that.

I'm currently in a hotel in San Francisco, attending a three day publishing conference courtesy of my employers.  (Thanks again to Donovan and JB for this great professional development opportunity.)  However, all work and no play makes Sid a dull boy, so at the end of today's official sessions I ducked out of the networking mixer and headed off in search of Borderlands Books, arguably San Francisco's premier science fiction and fantasy bookstore.

My trek was a bit more interesting than expected - let's just say that working near East Hastings in Vancouver is useful prep work for heading through San Francisco's Tenderloin District - but after a thirty-five minute walk I arrived at Borderlands' Valencia Street address.

Borderlands is a pleasant sunlit space, with both floor and bookshelves done in natural wood, and lots of space between bookcases for easy access to lower shelves.  They have a substantial and comprehensive collection of both used and new material, although I have to say that I'd be happier if they had their hardcover and trade paperbacks split up into separate areas for new and previously owned. I always find it irritating not to know what price range to expect when I pull a book off the shelf to look at the cost.

That being said, I was pleased to see that their pricing on used books was quite civilized.  I've gotten used to paying five or even six dollars for used books, so seeing three dollar used paperbacks was a nice change.

And what did I buy?  I splurged a bit in honour of my trip and bought a hardcover copy of Railsea, the new young adult novel by China Miéville which just hit the streets today.  I also picked up a paperback copy of Charles Stross' The Fuller Memorandum, part of his excellent Le-Carré-meets-Lovecraft Laundry series*, a replacement copy of Robert Frezza's quirky military SF novel A Small Colonial War, and purely on spec, Karin Lowachee's The Gaslight Dogs, about which I know nothing except what I read on the back cover.

Sadly, I didn't feel I had the time to have a cup of tea in their attached coffeeshop, although a quick look through the connecting arch showed an equally inviting venue.  I suspect that this is what Chapters is trying - and failing - to accomplish with their integral Starbucks.  Sorry, but it's really just not the same.

I was disappointed to see that the trademark Borderlands Sphinx cats were not working a shift that particular day - not only that, but the store's wooden screen door had a rip in it.  That aside, I would strongly recommend Borderlands Books - great selection, wonderful ambience, and good pricing.

However, I realize that my opening description of Borderlands as San Francisco's best genre store may be a bit contentious.  I can already hear purists yelling about The Other Change of Hobbit, but technically speaking that's in Berkeley, not San Francisco.  However, a little research reveals that they're close to a BART station...hmmm...well, it would only be fair...do I have anything planned for the day after the conference?

- Sid

* More to come on Stross in a future posting, he said optimistically.