I think I'll pass, thank you.

Yeah, funny thing...we never actually saw anyone get off this ride at the PNE...

- Sid

"And the weatherman says something’s on the move…."

The climate is what you expect; the weather is what you get.

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Texas is currently dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which made its landfall late on Friday with winds of 130 miles an hour and torrential rains. So far eight fatalities have been reported, and the region has been devastated by the combination of wind, rain and flooding.*

This kind of catastrophe seems to be the new normal of climate and weather in the new millennium, and it may well be that as time goes on, unchecked global climate change will continue to worsen the situation.  Hurricanes could become stronger, and the gaps between them shorter, until ultimately an constant stormfront gnawed sullenly at the Eastern coast of the United States.

What option would the future United States have when faced with an opponent of this magnitude? 

Retreat.

In that future, the United States finally abandons the East Coast, moving everything and everyone 100 miles inland.  However, the US economy depends on a ceaseless flow of seaborne cargo, so the waterfront must remain open.  The result:  Festung America - its ports bunkered emplacements of concrete and steel, like a Maginot line around a beleaguered country. And, like the Maginot Line, ultimately a futile gesture, outflanked as tornadoes brutally march across the American Midwest, and temperatures in California continue to climb above this year's record high of 125° F.

Remember when this sort of thing was more like science fiction?

- Sid

P.S. For some excellent reading in which weather conditions are part of the plot rather than the background to the story, I strongly recommend that you pick up Heavy Weather, by Bruce Sterling, and The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi.

* It's getting harder and harder to say anything that doesn't sound trite in terms of support and sympathy, there have been so many disasters in the past few years that it feels like everything has been said. I guess the simplest things are still the most true: good luck.  You are all in everyone's thoughts.

"Once upon a time there was light in my life..."

 

10:17 PDT - total eclipse starts.

2:47 EDT - total eclipse ends.

World did not come to an end - check.

Trump still president - check.

Oh well, you win some, you lose some....

- Sid

"Not that it's a B-52 in outer space."

"We spent weeks and weeks building it up, encrusting the set with pipes and wires and switches and tubing and just about anything we could lay our hands on.  Then we painted it military green and began stenciling labels on everything. Ridley came back from the States and said, 'That's it, you've got it,' and then told us to keep going."

Alien Art Director Roger Christian, The Book of Alien

My workplace has recently retired the two simulators that we were using for crane training. (If you're curious, we replaced them with actual cranes - it's actually more cost effective to buy a crane solely for the purposes of training rather than disrupting the regular flow of work by having trainees operate production equipment.)

The simulators have been torn down, and our facilities manager has invited bids from anyone in the company who want the elements of the unit for their own use.

I took a look at the bits and pieces that are up for grabs, and my first thought was that if I bought everything in the room, I would have a damn good start on turning our apartment into something very much like the bridge of the Nostromo, the spaceship from the original 1979 Alien film.

Swiss artist H. R. Giger's unique designs for the alien spaceship and the titular xenomorph tend to receive most of the attention when Alien is discussed, but it's impossible to ignore the strength of the design and art direction for the ship which is the backdrop for the action.

The initial designs were created by two of Britain's premier conceptual artists, Ron Cobb and Chris Foss, with the final look of the ship's interior based primarily on Cobb's artwork.  Cobb describes himself as "a frustrated engineer" and as such his designs are solidly based in practical reality. Cobb's design philosophy is aimed at enhancing the story rather than conflicting with it:

I resent films that are so shallow they rely entirely on their visual effects, and of course science fiction films are notorious for this.  I've always felt that there's another way to do it:  a lot of effort should be expended toward rendering the environment of the spaceship, or space travel, whatever the fantastic setting of your story should be - as convincingly as possible, but always in the background.  That way the story and the characters emerge and they become more real. If you were to set a story on an ocean liner, there would be bits of footage to explain what the ship was like docked or at sea, but it would remain at the background of the story.  It should be the same with science fiction.

The concepts were combined and refined by art director Roger Christian to create the final look that gives the movie its gritty, realistic feel.

 

"Ridley showed us Dr. Strangelove, and he kept saying, "That's what I want.  Do you see?  Not that it's a B-52 in outer space, but it's the military look.' You can't really draw it...but I knew what he was saying because I had done it in Star Wars, so I said...'Let's have a go at it.' "

In order to make the set as believable as possible, every control on the bridge had a practical function, so that if an actor hit a swich, it would have an effect - a light would go on or off, a view would change, and so on.  The set was deliberately built to have a ceiling low enough to be visible, which combined with the fighter-bomber influenced overhead consoles to give the bridge a tight, claustrophic feel.

I can easily see how our apartment hallway would change into one of the ship's corridors, the second bedroom could be the escape craft set, and the living room would be the perfect site for the bridge of the Nostromo.  Heck, there's even a cat to fill in for Jones, the ship's feline mascot, although Jaq is a bit more solidly built than his movie alter ego.  Now all I have to do is convince Karli that this is something that we want to do to our home.  Gosh, that seems easy enough...

- Sid

"So put me on! Don’t be afraid!"

There’s nothing hidden in your head

The Sorting Hat can’t see,

So try me on and I will tell you

Where you ought to be.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Today at lunch I went to the bank to get some cash for an upcoming getaway to the Okanagan Valley with my partner Karli and her squad.  I work near Vancouver's Downtown East Side, and in order to get to the nearest branch of the CIBC, I have to pass Main and Hastings - possibly Canada's most notorious crossroads - walking past addicts and beggars, people selling drugs or selling their bodies, and people who have lost their grip on reality due to mental illness of some sort.

Every time I walk past that particular intersection, I wish that I were Harry Potter, armed with the Sorting Hat and a magic wand.  Everyone in the DTES would line up, and the Sorting Hat would look into their minds to discover the real reason for them being where they are.

"A regular person, a little bit stuck

All out of money and down on their luck." 

A tap of the magic wand, and they've got an entry level job and a decent place to live.

"Addiction to drugs is a terrible curse

That takes the afflicted from bad into worse."

Tap of the wand, and poof, rehabilitation - then a job and a home, just like first group.

"Mentally ill and right out of your head

Lost in the dark when off of your meds."

Magic wand:  proper medical care and a safe haven for those poor souls who wander the DTES screaming at a world that they can't understand.

"Criminal, villainous, evil and cruel

Refusing to follow the civilized rules."

Unfortunately, there may well be people who should not pass GO or collect $200, but rather should go directly to jail. Some of this last group needs rehabilitation and redemption as much as addicts or the mentally ill, or may just need a job and a new start, but the hat will tell us exactly what is in everyone's heart - if you're just a bad person, you pay the consequences.

And then, when everyone had put on the hat and been tapped by the wand, Hastings and Main would just be another address.  How sad that it would probably take magic to make that a reality.

- Sid

Fallout 4: Not to mention Kevin Costner.

I've found four or five people equipped like this in Fallout 4 - hopefully SF author David Brin was amused by the post-apocalyptic nod from Bethesda.  (The bad news is that they were all corpses, which may be the most probable result of running around after the end of the world trying to scam people by pretending to be a postman.)

- Sid

Fallout 4: The Life Aquatic.

As part of my Survival mode replay of Fallout 4, I've also been exploring parts of the map that I just didn't get to previously, such as Spectacle Island*, located in the ocean to the southeast of the city.  Because I'm unable to fast travel to locations, I've also been using bays and lakes as shortcuts to speed up my travel time.

As a result, I've been spending a lot of game time underwater - which, quite frankly, creeps me out.  I had a bad experience with water as a small child, which has left me with a lifelong aversion to swimming.  I realize full well that I'm just looking at pixels on a screen, but my chest tightens a bit whenever I jump into a body of water and the weight of my power armour pulls me down, down, down to the bottom.

It tightens even more whenever I find myself forced into deeper water for any reason - it's one thing to enter the ocean by walking into the water from a beach, a completely different thing to discover that, in order to make your exit, you have to detour deeper to find a path out of a shipping channel.

Granted, if you stay underwater long enough, your armour will eventually run out of air (which, again, creeped me out more than a little the first time it happened and I realized that I was in trouble) but there's also an upgrade perk which allows you to breathe underwater, so now that I have that, presumably I could spend as much time as I want marching around in the wet.

Unfortunately, the game programmers haven't done very much to make it worth my while.  There's a bit of seaweed, some sunken cargo containers, the occasional ditched aircraft or drowned house, at least one suit of submerged power armour, and my trip to Spectacle Island revealed massive enigmatic pipelines running under the water, but that's about it. There are amphibious monsters in the game, but I haven't run into anything dangerous under the water, all of my encounters have taken place in the air.**  In fact, it's not even possible to deploy weapons when submerged.

If anyone from the game development group at Bethesda Softworks is reading this, I'd like to strongly recommend that they change all that. Making the underwater environment as fully featured as the land would be a huge opportunity to add additional depth (no pun intended) to the game.

As hinted by the appearance of dead fish and beached mutant shark-dolphins on the shoreline, it would be easy to create an underwater ecology to match the surface one.  Whereas on the surface the player harvests plants and shoots animals - either for food or in self-defense - the submarine survivor would be dredging up seaweed, prying open shell fish, and defending themselves against whatever undersea menaces the creative minds in game development could come up with.

And, obviously, there would have to be an armoury of subsurface weaponry:  spear guns, tridents, and so on, as well as modifications to the existing catalogue of surface weapons to allow underwater usage.  (After all, a knife is a knife, whether you're on land or under the sea.)

To make it even more involved, the concept of underwater settlements would be an interesting addition.  Whereas on the surface, settlements are restricted to certain areas, the oceanic equivalent would be abandoned undersea bases which the player would have to pump out, supply with oxygen, and equip with defenses against pirates or aquatic creatures. There could even be one or two of the experimental Vaults that sheltered a selected few from the atomic holocaust - perhaps one with a secret tunnel connecting it to another Vault located on the mainland.

The creation of submarine wildlife would be simple. Instead of birds, there would be fish, the amphibious mirelurks would have a larger role as we discovered their underwater nests and communities, and the reptilian deathclaws would only need gills and fins to make the change to life in the ocean.

Frankly, I'd like them to stop there.  As we go further from land, the bottom drops away to vast dark gulfs, alien to light and warmth, where unimaginable horrors may lie in wait...

Seriously, the underwater parts already make me nervous, I don't need to have nightmares.

- Sid

* An actual island near the real-world Boston.  Thompson Island, located closer to the mainland, didn't make the cut for the game.

** Although  I do seem to recall being attacked while wading around in the sewers in Fallout 3.

“Is the future going to be all girl?”

What does it feel like to be the first woman Doctor?

"It feels completely overwhelming, as a feminist, as a woman, as an actor, as a human, as someone who wants to continually push themselves and challenge themselves, and not be boxed in by what you’re told you can and can’t be. It feels incredible."

-  Jodie Whittaker

And so, without an excessive amount of inappropriate fan-boy fallout*, the first woman Doctor: 34-year-old English** actor Jodie Whittaker. Whittaker fits nicely into the profile of Doctor Who leads since the 2005 reboot: she's an experienced professional with a solid portfolio of work, but her acting profile isn't extremely high, which makes her an affordable casting choice for the show.*** (As per previous discussion of budgets, salaries and so on.)

That being said, I hope that her wage packet is comparable to her predecessors, given the manner in which the BBC is currently struggling with gender pay gap problems. In one of this season's episodes, the Doctor commented that the Time Lords are "billions of years beyond your petty obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes" - BBC management would do well to follow their example.

As fans adjust to the change, it's fair to say that Ms. Whittaker will have to accept some changes as well.  Apparently in the past she has been happy to go unrecognized by people on the street, preferring a low profile in public - ah, well, I have some bad news for you there, Jodie...  

Similarly, she'll need to prepare herself to answer questions about life in the TARDIS that have little to do with her craft as an actor.  I recall interviews with Liam Neeson regarding his work as Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace in which he was so obviously baffled by questions about lightsabers and the Force, rather than character development and acting decisions.

Whittaker has worked with two previous Doctors:  she shared the stage with Christopher Eccleston in a theatrical production of Antigone in 2012, in which she played the title role, and more recently appeared with David Tennant on Broadchurch.  When asked for his opinion on Whittaker's casting during a recent appearance on The Tonight Show, Tennant commented:

“You know, sure, Jodie is from a different gender than anyone who has gone before, but that will be irrelevant almost immediately once she takes the part.  It’s about finding the right performer at the right time, and that’s Jodie, without a doubt.”

He's completely correct - Whittaker's gender should be irrelevant, she should be judged on the quality of her work rather than her sex. However, I suspect it's going to be challenging for people to avoid commenting on her status as the first female Doctor when discussing her performance  - I think of this as the Obama Effect.  Hopefully she'll be able to make her mark based on more than just being the first woman in the role.

But let's not diminish that milestone.  The last couple of years have been very positive for the genre in terms of strong female leads: Rey in The Force Awakens, Jyn Erso in Rogue One, the massively successful Wonder Woman movie, and now a female Doctor. To quote an exchange from the final episode of this season:

The Master: “Is the future going to be all girl?”

The Doctor: ”We can only hope.”

- Sid

* I somehow doubt that many of the naysayers are fan-girls, although you never know.

** I bet we'll have to wait a LOT longer for the lead in Doctor Who not to be from the British Isles.  It's been surprising enough that two of the last three were Scottish.

*** I've also seen photos of Whittaker that demonstrate a slightly maniacal grin, which seems to have become one of the prerequisites for the part.

"Happy birthday to you...."

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Curiousity rover on Mars - and, with apologies, a belated anniversary greeting to its older brother Opportunity, still operating after thirteen and a half years of travelling the Martian surface.  Best wishes from your organic brothers and sisters on Earth!  It's a commonly known fact that you play "Happy Birthday" for your anniversaries - I wish there was cake, too*.

 - Sid

* Candles would be a nice touch, but a bit of a challenge given the atmospheric conditions:  the Martian atmosphere is only 0.13% oxygen, as opposed to 21% here on Earth.