Updates.

"Sergeant Storm, Major Matt Mason's Space Friend!"

 

Over time, I've kept a casual eye on opportunities to add to my little collection of Major Matt Mason toys from the 60s, but generally the options on eBay are either a bit more than I want to spend, or not in very good condition.

However, it would seem that perseverance is its own reward.  I had the misfortune of waking up early on Wednesday morning, and as a result had some extra time before getting ready for work.  So I checked on a Matt Mason figure that I'd been following on eBay, only to discover that it had been purchased by someone else.  However, it recommended another auction:  a Sergeant Storm figure in relatively good condition at only $49.00 for the Buy It Now option - a very reasonable price compared to similar listings. Not only that, but the seller would only ship within Canada, which sounded to me like a clear message. A few quick clicks and voila, a new addition to my toy collection.

The slightly damaged 1966 "blue strap" figure comes with a slightly damaged flight propulsion pack - interestingly, the damage on the pack matches the damage to the paint on the back of the figure. It turns out that if you leave a painted rubber action figure in contact with a polystyrene accessory for long enough, the paint will glue itself to the plastic - remind me to keep an eye on the Major, who spends all of his time strapped into his near-mint Supernaut Power Limbs. I'd really hate to see him get stuck in there.


"He had it coming, he had it coming, he only had himself to blame..."

 

I'm now on my third Survival attempt in The Long Dark game.  The second one ended 81 days in after repeated falls through thin ice (my own fault for not paying attention to the health bar - the game was telling me that my Risk of Hypothermia affliction was Healed, but apparently it doesn't matter what temperature the water is when you drown).

I'm currently 41 days into my current run, and after recently recovering from multiple wolf attacks, it was with a certain sense of grim satisfaction that I returned to the scene of the crime after finding some .303 ammo for my battered Lee Enfield rifle at the Hunting Lodge in the Broken Railroad map.  The score:  two bullets, 10 kilograms of wolf meat, and a couple of useful hides for crafting.  And hey, they started it.



"A red day, a sword day!"

 

Wish me luck:  I'm finally registered for a month of Longsword Training at Vancouver's Academie Duello, starting next Tuesday at 7:30.  I generally avoid group activities like this, a stance reinforced by an unfortunate experience with ballroom dance classes many years ago, so I'm a bit nervous about how things will work out in practice. At least in this case no one has falsely assured me that there will be lots and lots of potential partners in attendance - and if I do have to dance with the instructor, well, the circumstances are a little different.



Coming Soon!

Does anyone else mark book release dates on their calendars?  Anyone?  No?  Well, not the biggest surprise in my life...   On that basis, let me just remind everyone that the eighth book in the Expanse series, Tiamat's Wrath, will be dropping from Orbit* on March 26th.

Authors often struggle to keep a concept fresh over multiple novels, but the team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the writing partners behind the nom de plume of James S. A. Corey, have done an excellent job of maintaining the ongoing story of Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante.  Damn - that reminds me, I still need to find some time to sit down with the first season of  the SciFi adaptation that I purchased on Blu-ray...so much media, so little time.


At least the cover art is finished...

 

The present tense made him nervous.

William Gibson, Neuromancer 

Speaking of books on the "Coming Soon" list, I was curious as to whether or not Agency, William Gibson's follow-up to The Peripheral, was going to make its scheduled debut in December after I had mentioned it in last year's Geekmas list.

Given that it was originally supposed to be released on December 25th in 2018, was pushed to April 2nd of 2019, and is now scheduled for September 3rd, I'm just a little concerned as to whether or not Bill is doing okay. Now, for all I know William Gibson has been late with every novel he's ever written, I've never tried to track that before, but it seems worrisome that the release date has been so publicly changed twice now.

The joke, if there is one, is that Agency is apparently set in an alternative 2017 in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election - a what-if version of the world that we are getting further and further away from every single day.

- Sid

* Ha, little science fiction joke:  Orbit is the publishing company.

Where is John Nada when you need him?

Oh, by the way, I've cracked the code.
I've figured out these shadow organizations
And the Illuminati know
That they're finally primed for world domination.
And soon you've got black helicopters comin' cross the border
Puppet masters for the New World Order
Be aware: there's always someone that's watching you.
And still the government won't admit they faked the whole moon landing
Thought control rays, psychotronic scanning
Don't mind that, I'm protected cause I made this hat
From aluminum foil (foil)...
Wear a hat that's foil lined
In case an alien's inclined
To probe your butt or read your mind.
Looks a bit peculiar ('culiar)
Seems a little crazy
But someday I'll prove (I'll prove, I'll prove, I'll prove)
There's a big conspiracy.

Weird Al Yankovic, Foil

Free, free for the first time from the subliminal voices of our reptilian overlords!!  But for how long?

- Sid

Mission Complete.

My battery is low and it's getting dark.

Final message from Opportunity rover, June 10, 2018.

After over a thousand attempts at contact*, NASA has officially announced that it is no longer attempting to revive the inactive Opportunity Mars rover, thereby ending the longest running rover mission to date. 

When you consider that Opportunity operated for close to 15 years and covered 45 kilometers of the Martian landscape, it's almost ridiculous to look at its original mission as part of the Mars Exploration Rover program:  to last 90 Martian days and travel one kilometer from its landing site.  On that basis, I appreciate the fact that NASA has logged this as "Mission Complete" - that's a much better epitaph for Opportunity than any of the various headlines announcing that the rover is dead.  It's equally appropriate that Opportunity's last resting place is in Perseverance Valley, on the edge of Endeavour Crater. 

In his 2012 book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson makes the following comment:

Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.

I'm sorry, Neil, but I have to disagree with you.  I think that in this case, it would be completely appropriate to name a high school after a robot: you'd be hard pressed to find a better example of how to overcome obstacles and exceed expectations than Opportunity.

- Sid

* Including an 18-song playlist.

Valley Girl.

Valentine's Day 2019 will see the release of Alita: Battle Angel, James Cameron's return to the big screen as writer and producer, with Robert Rodriguez in the director's chair.  The movie is based on Japanese writer/artist Yukito Kishiro's 1990 manga series, which was translated into English and republished by Viz Comics in 1992 - as far as I know, I still have three or four years of the black and white Viz editions tucked away in storage with the rest of my comics.

The comic book version of Battle Angel Alita tells the tale of a have/have not world where the sky is dominated by the isolated floating city of Tiphares*, which rains down its trash onto the Junkyard that lies below. Cyberphysician Daisuke Ido, an exile from the city, is wandering through the piles of junk in search of spare parts when he stumbles upon a discarded cyborg head and upper torso which still holds life.  He takes this fragment of a person back to his laboratory and repairs it.

He names his discovery Alita  - she has no memories of her name, or of her life before her re-awakening in the lab.   However, when she discovers that Ido has a second life as a bounty hunter, she also learns that her subconscious mind contains an instinctive knowledge of Panzer Kunst -  the "Armoured Art", an acrobatic cyborg martial arts technique originally created for zero-gravity combat.
 
The comic follows Alita as she also becomes a bounty hunter, finds - and loses - love, participates in the brutal and deadly sport of Motorball, and eventually ends up as a ground agent for the rulers of Tiphares.  From what I gather from the trailers, the movie combines the first three parts of Alita's life into a single plot.  Based on those same trailers, the movie completely nails the visual style of the comics - and that's where I'm concerned.

For the most part, the quality of the art direction is a good thing. The sets look good, and the casting is spot-on:  Christoph Waltz is perfect for Alita's enigmatic saviour Dr. Ido, Mahershala Ali is identical to the villainous Vector, and the glimpses that we see of the more robotic cyborgs are an excellent evocation of the over-the-top cyberpunk look of the manga.

However, it's the character of Alita, as played by 33-year-old actress Rosa Salazar, that worries me.  Her digitally reworked face is intended to match the stylized manga convention for wide-eyed female characters, and I can't help but feel that it pushes her character into the trap that has captured so many computer-generated characters:  the Uncanny Valley.

 

The concept of the Uncanny Valley was introduced by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe the negative reaction that people often have to near-duplicates of humanity.  As representations of a person get closer and closer to reality, the response becomes more and more positive up until a point where it dips down sharply before ascending once again.  That dip in the curve is the Uncanny Valley.

The problem is that we perceive these almost-but-not-quite perfect copies of humanity as being weird or creepy - the "uncanny" part of the term.

Computer animation is constantly flirting with the Valley. The characters in the 2007 film Beowulf, 2001's  Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Polar Express from 2004 and the digital Princess Leia** from Rogue One in 2016 are often cited as prime examples of Valley - characters that come disconcertingly close to achieving life, but not close enough.  The Alita that I've seen in the trailers, with her enlarged anime eyes, may be sliding into the Valley as well.

It seems odd to pick on her modified facial features when the movie is full of extravagant combinations of human and machine,  but as the concept of the Valley suggests, it's the closeness to actual humanity that creates the disconnect.  The less human a character looks, the less likely they are to trigger that sense of dissonance that characterizes the Uncanny Valley.

That being said, I'm willing to trust Cameron's instincts.  After all, the same sort of comments might be made about the semi-feline blue aliens from Avatar, and audiences seemed to have no problem spending close to three billion dollars at the box office to experience their world.

But even then, unlike Neytiri and the Na'vi, Alita is actually intended to be almost human - is she human enough? We'll see what the audience decides on the 14th.

- Sid

* There are some odd changes from the Japanese language version to the Viz release:  the city of Salem becomes Tiphares, Junk Iron City changes to the Junkyard, and Gally is reborn as Alita.  The movie version obviously kept her  new name, but I don't know where the rest of the proper nouns ended up.

** Digital Grand Moff Tarkin was a bit more positively received - it's a fine line.

" If I don’t get a rose tonight, it’s the biggest upset of all time."

"My brand is the pensive gentleman. He could have a glass of good scotch, he could have a book in his hand, he could have a flower in his hand giving it to a lady."

Jordan Kimball, Season 14, The Bachelorette

- Sid

Where we're going next.

Canada's most renowned astronaut, Colonel Chris Hadfield, will be hitting the road to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing* in his "Exploration: Where We're Going Next" tour. The tour will see the heavily decorated astronaut, engineer and pilot discussing the history and future of space exploration.

Regular visitors to The Infinite Revolution will already be aware that I'm a bit of a Chris Hadfield fan:  as such, probably not a surprise that I've just purchased two tickets to his next speaking tour - which, surprisingly, appears to be restricted to Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.  Hmmm...visiting friends in Western Canada at the end of April and decided to do a few talks for beer money, Commander? 

- Sid

* Which is actually not until July 20th**, so he's jumping the gun a little.

** And Neil Armstrong didn't step onto the surface until the 21st.