I HATE it when that happens.

Sometimes when I'm waiting for a file to transfer or a disc to burn, I'll grab a paperback from my conveniently located bookshelves and just read a page while I wait.

Today I picked out The Atrocity Archives, the first book in the Laundry series by Charles Stross.  Stross is a brilliant author, who goes back and forth between hard SF novels like Singularity Sky and H. P. Lovecraft/John le Carré/computer geek mashups like the Laundry books with consumate skill. 

I flipped open The Atrocity Archives near the end of the story, where the action is taking place in an alternate dimension, an Earth near absolute zero, where the oxygen has long since frozen and fallen as snow to the brittle, lifeless soil - "colder than summer on Pluto", as it's described in the book.  

The group from our Earth is being stalked by body-snatching demons, eager to take possession of the invaders and use their bodies to escape through the portal to our dimension.  However, the hero of the story (who would laugh at that particular tag) harvests the hands from the long-dead corpses of sacrificial victims, and uses them to create Hands of Glory, a magical item that renders the person carrying it invisible.  All they have to do is ignite the fingertips, and then escape through the portal.  

Now, I've read this book a couple of times, enjoyed it enormously, purchased the sequels, and would probably buy the t-shirt if one was available.  But today this little voice in the back of my head spoke up:

Absolute zero...no air....

Ignite the fingers...escape through the portal...

....

How do the fingers keep burning in a vacuum?

Damn.  I had exactly the same experience reading a Terry Pratchett novel where a character fires the seventh bullet in a six bullet clip into the floor rather than his adversary.   It somehow subverts the whole process, you know?  

- Sid

Gnomic statements V.

I have always wished that there was someone to be the Amanda to my Neil.

- Sid

 

"ALL DAY BREAKFAST!" just isn't as thought-provoking.

Some interpretations of quantum physics suggest that there are a myriad of parallel universes to our own. In traditional quantum physics experiments such as Schrödinger's Cat, the state of the cat in the box with the particle-activated poison is indeterminant until observed, at which point the wave function collapses into one state or another.  The parallel universe approach says that the wave function doesn't collapse, but decoheres or divides, thereby creating one universe in which the cat is alive, and one in which the cat is dead.  Since this approach would apply to every event from the subatomic level up to my choice of beer, infinity would hardly seem large enough to contain all of the alternate universes. 

However, in the empirically experienced universe where I decided to photograph this sign, it turned out that I wasn't the Guinness drinking version. Either way (literally), if you ask me this is pretty intellectual stuff for a pub sign - at least in this universe.

- Sid

 

A new hope?

Tonight at the gym I watched the last half hour of A New Hope while I did cardio.

Someplace/somehow/sometime I stumbled across a digital copy of the original cut, a kind of geek trophy, posted on some thief’s fileshare paradise in a shadowy corner of the Internet.

This is the perfect version, the magical version, a stand-alone Joseph Campbell Hero With A Thousand Faces space opera fantasy tale, heroes, villains, scoundrels, princesses, wizards, quests, victories, sacrifices, all indifferent to matte lines and parsecs, where Han knows he has to shoot first and a farm boy falls in love with a princess, the version that George Lucas made without any plans for the future, constructed before he lost his confidence and started obsessively rethinking and reworking the trilogy.

Since then, millions and millions of pages and frames and words have been added to the Star Wars story, folding it in on itself over and over again, like forging a Japanese sword, layer upon layer upon layer of plot and character.  But the result has become a peculiar failure, the elaborate construction and multiple changes making the result brittle and dull, losing the razor sharp brilliance of the original.

Wouldn’t it be funny if, after all the comments and criticisms and jokes about their Lucasfilm purchase, Walt Disney™ brought back the magic?

- Sid

"Without irony or snark."

He’s a super-agent and possibly even a super-soldier, he’s been military and law enforcement (and a scout master!) in past incarnations, and his power set is quite grounded and so he wears armour and carries gear. His night-sticks, or tonfa, new to this incarnation, are his signature weapon. They can electrify at his command, or can merge into a single bo staff. All non-lethal weapons, (but formidable in the right hands) something that touches on his Canadian-ness, which is at the heart of this revamp, without irony or snark. We’ve seen patriotic super-soldier characters before, but we want to emphasize the things that set a Canadian one apart. Cap doesn’t carry a gun or a sword or blast people to smithereens, he relies on strategy, negotiation, and wits. And he’s also super-polite, it’s a real power that all Canadians possess.

Comic creator Kalman Andrasofszky on the new Captain Canuck.

Among my Boxing Week purchases in 2012 was a marked down DVD/blu-ray combo copy of Captain America, which according to one of the reviewer blurbs is "the best superhero movie ever!"

And you know, they may be right.  Steve Rogers' journey from 4F to supersoldier is handled with the perfect combination of sincerity, dignity and humour - there isn't a false note in the whole film.  Watching it again after seeing it in theatrical release, I'm struck again by the perfection of that last line in the movie, that matter-of-fact statement of regret when he says, "I had a date…"

Captain America, with his roots in World War II, is one of the most iconic comic book heroes - quite literally iconic, the man is wearing a flag and is named after his country.   Because of that iconic nature, with its focus on honour and integrity, there has always been a sort of purity to the character in all of its various incarnations. 

Canada's equivalent, Captain Canuck, is currently being rebooted in animated form - the video teaser clip shows a parcouriste Captain leaping from rooftop to rooftop. It's quite a departure from the old uniform - the octagonal texture effect in the fabric is a bit trendy, and I'm not sure about the shoes, but overall, it's a good look, and I like the graphic integration of the Canadian flag motif into the uniform.

But really, that's all irrelevant.  If they can't bring the right sort of representative elements to the character, the Canadian equivalent to the elements that have always defined Captain America, then the new Captain will just be another spandex knockoff.  However, there's a good chance that Andrasofszky can pull it off - after all, he's a Canadian too.

 - Sid

 

Yes, still on the flying cars thing.

Yeah, what he said.

* * *

Happy New Year, everyone!  One more step into the future, flying cars or not.

 - Sid

(From Surviving The World, by Dante Shepherd)