Resource wars on the Moon!

 From an article on CNN.com:

On one hand, this is terrible, it makes the Space Policy Institute spokesman sound like a jingoistic American Manifest Destiny cliché, and seems to suggest that the situation could escalate into active conflict between the Communist block countries and the American-aligned Artemis mission nations over the resources on the Moon.

On the other hand, I'm actually a bit pleased by how much this real-time article sounds like an excerpt from a science fiction novel.  Please don't judge me, as with the ISS, I somewhat love anything that reflects the degree to which we live in the future.

- Sid

Space Guns.

Another trailer has dropped for Andor, the latest of the Disney Star Wars series, and there's been some negative feedback regarding what appears to be an AK-47 in one of the shots.  Some viewers have found this to be completely unacceptable, and have voiced their disapproval in no uncertain terms:

Sigh...

Whereas I appreciate the passion that fans feel regarding what they consider to be insults to beloved franchises, in this case I feel that it reveals a lack of background knowledge regarding the origins of the Star Wars arsenal and the degree to which they can be considered to be "space guns".  This is also one of those rare situations where my other hobby - military history - overlaps with my genre interests.

Let's look at some examples from A New Hope, starting with the Imperial DL-19 Heavy Blaster, which is a WWII German MG34 with virtually no modifications other than covering up the ammunition feed.

DL-19 Heavy Blaster

MG34 Light Machine Gun

The E-11 blaster, standard Imperial Stormtrooper issue throughout the original trilogy, is a Sterling submachine gun with some modifications tacked on, the magazine replaced with a cut-down plug, and a dodgy looking scope - by the way, is there a single scene in any of the movies where a Stormtrooper unfolds the stock and fires their blaster from their shoulder?

E-11 Blaster

Sterling Submachine Gun

And we'll end with Han Solo's iconic blaster, which is a Mauser C96 with a nicer looking scope than the E-11, and some added greebly dressing - the term used by the Star Wars prop team to describe the process of layering props and sets with futuristic accessories. Impressively, there's no attempt at all to conceal the distinctive hammer mechanism, even though I'm pretty sure Han isn't shooting 7.63 Parabellum.

DL-44 Blaster

Mauser C-96*

Coincidentally, the original DL-44 prop is up for auction - sort of.  After production completed for A New Hope, most of the gun-based props were returned to the supplier, the Bapty & Co. prop house, where they were stripped of their greeblies, and put back into stock.  After all, there was no expectation that the movie would prove to be as popular as it was, and as such there was no reason to preserve the props. Following the success of the first film, cast resin versions of the gun were used in the next two episodes.

After finding what he believed to be the original Mauser used to create the DL-44, the owner of Bapty asked the original lead armorer from the film to see if he could find the remaining parts needed to rebuild the prop.  The resulting creation, which will go up for auction by the Rock Island Auction House at the end of August, contains approximately 80% of the original version.  However, only serious fans need apply, bidding is expected to start at $300,000 USD and could easily exceed half a million - not bad for something that isn't really a space gun.

- Sid

* This image has been flipped horizontally for ease of comparison.

"To Infinity..."

In 1995 a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday.
It was from his favorite movie. 

This is that movie.

Pixar's Lightyear is based on the concept that the Buzz Lightyear toys from the Toy Story movies must have been merchandising from some sort of intellectual property, in the same way that Sheriff Woody and his gang had their origins in the 1950s children's program Woody's Roundup. Ultimately, that idea is irrelevant to the plot of Lightyear, although it's an interesting meta decision to introduce a fictional franchise within a fictional franchise.

The film introduces Buzz Lightyear as the pilot of a Star Command exploratory spaceship that crashes on an alien planet after attempting to escape hostile life forms encountered on the planet's surface.  Buzz, who is responsible for the crash due to egotistically ignoring offers of assistance and the advice of the autopilot, volunteers to pilot the ship being used to test an experimental replacement hyperdrive crystal.

However, he falls prey to the effects of time dilation and drifts increasingly out of sync with the rest of the crew, not to mention his best friend, who grows old and dies over the course of his repeated unsuccessful near-lightspeed test flights. Eventually his robotic cat companion solves the hyperdrive crystal problem, but on his return from a successful test, he discovers that robotic invaders have attacked the colony, and he must work with a misfit team to defeat the villainous Zurg and save the day.

Lightyear is a pretty good space opera. It's a solid little science fiction story with a couple of interesting twists, the art direction is excellent, Chris Evans does a near-perfect imitation of the original Buzz Lightyear voice (my apologies to Tim Allen, but really, it's very good), and it makes surprisingly good use of relativistic physics and the effects of travelling at near light-speed (although I'll be honest and admit that I haven't actually checked the math for the time dilation ratio).

All that being said, I found that it somehow lacked the emotional impact that Pixar normally brings to the table. When I watch a Pixar production, I expect there to be at least one scene that brings a tear to my eye - for example, in The Incredibles, it's the moment where Mr. Incredible tells his wife that he's not strong enough to lose her again. 

It's hard to say why Lightyear isn't more successful in that sense, you can certainly see them trying.  There are some inspirational bits, a couple of tragic moments, a message from a dead friend, and a redemptive conclusion, you'd think at least one of those would have rung the bell to make me well up, but somehow Lightyear doesn't manage to pull it off, in spite of how good it is otherwise.  It's possible that the script's just a bit too heavy handed: as I commented above, their attempts to create an emotional moment are quite obvious rather than being an organic part of the story.

It occurred to me while I was watching Lightyear that it could just as easily been done as a live action film, and I might well have found it more entertaining in that format.  When you look at the cast of voice actors, it's completely feasible for them to replace their animated counterparts: Chris Evans, Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi, Isiah Whitlock Jr. - okay, at 44, Bill Hader admittedly feels a bit old to play Star Ranger recruit Featheringhamstan.  That aside, it would be easy for Disney to add Lightyear to its list of animation-to-live-action projects, although they should probably bump it up the priority queue in case Chris Evans starts to lose his hair.

But that takes us to another question regarding the franchise within a franchise and the film within a film.  Granted, Lightyear is Andy's favourite movie, but Andy is a character in an animated world.  In that model, in Andy's reality, is Lightyear a live action production performed by actors, or is it an animated movie? 

- Sid

Missed opportunities.

This morning, my wife Karli and I experienced a rare crossover in our sleeping schedules: she woke up early and I slept in a bit, which resulted in both of us being awake at 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning.  We decided that we should celebrate this unexpected overlap by going out for breakfast, and strolled down Broadway to the Sunshine Diner, one of Vancouver's iconic breakfast spots.

We found a pleasant table in the shade, enjoyed a somewhat expensive breakfast (welcome to the 2022 economy, even eggs are not cheap right now), settled the bill, and started our walk home.

As we left the restaurant and headed past the rest of the outdoor dining, I unexpectedly caught sight of  what appeared to be a familiar face.  

Photography is funny, taking someone's picture can often embed them quite solidly in your memory, and in this case I was certain that I'd photographed the person in question eight years ago at a Vancouver Writer's Fest event, featuring cyberpunk legend William Gibson, and two newcomers on the scene, fantasy authors A. M. Dellamonica and Sebastien de Castell, the second of whom was apparently discussing toast options with a waitress at the restaurant we'd just left.

I waited until we'd walked a discreet distance along Broadway, and then excitedly told Karli of my sighting.  She urged me to go back and talk to him, but I felt reluctant to accost someone trying to have a quiet breakfast on the off chance that I had correctly recognized them from an eight-year-old memory, and convinced her that we should just head back to our apartment.

When we got home, I checked my original blog posting from 2014 and took at look at his web site, and decided that it might well have been Mr. de Castell after all. Conveniently, the web site included a contact form, and I thought it would be polite to pass along my best wishes, regardless of whether or not it had actually been him, and composed the following: 

As my wife and I were leaving the Sunshine Diner on Broadway this morning, I turned to her and said, "THAT was Sebastien de Castell ordering breakfast back there!!! He's a brilliant fantasy author, I saw him at a Writer's Fest event with William Gibson a few years ago!"

She said, "Did you want to go back?"

"No, I don't want to interrupt the man's breakfast just to be a fanboy, what kind of Canadian would I be? And I could be wrong, it might not be him."

But, just in case, I would have said that I've really enjoyed your Greatcoat books, excellent stuff, thanks so much! And if it was you, I also hope you enjoyed your breakfast, it took us forever to get coffee.

To my mild surprise and extreme gratification, I received a response a couple of hours later, presumably after he had finished breakfast, returned home, and decided to check e-mail.

Hi Sid,

Yes, that was indeed me. Why didn’t you stop by and say hello? I wouldn’t have minded at all. More importantly, it would’ve impressed my wife tremendously, which is really the primary motivation of my existence. The only occasion on which someone’s come up to my table at a restaurant and asked if I was myself was at the lovely Fable restaurant down on 4th. The person who came up was an as-yet unpublished novelist named Nicholas Eames, who’s now a much more famous novelist than I am.

So just think what you missed out on ;)

Thanks for the kind words about the Greatcoats!

Best,

Sebastien

It's always a pleasure when someone who is in the public eye in any way responds well to their fan base, and I feel that Mr. de Castell's response is both friendly and gracious.  In return, I strongly recommend his writing to anyone reading this post - for more information, please visit:

https://decastell.com/

And, if you believe that lightning strikes twice and you'd like to have your own brush with greatness, you are welcome to visit the Sunshine Diner at 2649 W Broadway in Vancouver, who knows, you may get lucky.  Although, full disclosure, I only go there for breakfast once in a while.

- Sid

"When I was a young Warthog..."

Master Chief: "You told me there wouldn't be any cameras."

Sergeant Johnson: "And you told me you were going to wear something nice!"

- Halo 2

Today, Karli and I paid a rare visit to Walmart in search of the perfect shower curtain ring - we'd purchased a new shower liner at Bed Bath and Beyond, but Karli didn't like their hardware options for hanging it, so we decided to look elsewhere.

While we were wandering around the store, I did a quick pass through their toy section.  Walmart stores often have a surprising range of movie and video game related toys, and I always like to take a look at their shelves to see what's on display.

This time, I was surprised to see a boxed Warthog Light Reconnaissance Vehicle from the Bungie Studios Halo gaming franchise, on sale at half price: twenty dollars rather than the original $39.99 sticker price.  Generally I'm much more of a browser than a buyer, but in this case I decided to add a Warthog to our shopping cart - what's life without the occasional spur of the moment purchase?

The Warthog comes in several pieces, with some assembly required, as toy package labelling cliché would have it. It's not terribly challenging - you snap the tires onto the ends of the axles, mount the tribarrel machine gun into the socket on the back of the vehicle and connect the ammo feed, clip the four red fuel cans onto the rear storage rack, and you're good to go.  The Master Chief figure which is packaged with the vehicle fits snugly into the driver's seat - it's unfortunate that there isn't a second figure to man the tribarrel, but I acknowledge the manufacturer's inevitable desire to make a buck by having you buy a standalone figure or two to fill up the crew.  

My purchase clearly illustrates the difference between what we'll refer to as play-grade and collector-grade toys.  The Warthog mold is detailed and comprehensive, and the body finish has been given some manufacturing equivalent of dry-brushing* for a more weathered look.  However, I feel that a collector grade toy would have more moving parts than just the wheels. The undercarriage is glued together rather than a single piece, but there's no articulation for the suspension, winch or axles, and the tribarrel mount isn't really designed to rotate, which is kind of a shame. The tribarrel itself also seems to be a less sharp mold than the rest of the pieces.

The 3 3/4 inch Master Chief figure doesn't have a lot of detail, although it does have reasonably good joint articulation, which, admittedly is probably better for play time than the opposite. And that's a key element regarding the comments above: a plastic toy made with extra moving parts and realistic suspension probably wouldn't last a day in the destructive hands of a playful 9-year old.

Ultimately, I recognize that it's just a toy, and as such it's definitely a fun little piece of shelf decoration that wasn't too expensive - if you'd like one for your bookshelves, I encourage you to hurry on down to your local Walmart while supplies last.  Oh, and Karli strongly recommends their shower rings, in case you feel that you need a more adult excuse to do some shopping.

- Sid

*  For readers not involved in miniatures and modelling, dry brushing is a painting technique in which almost all the paint is wiped off the brush, and then the remaining paint is lightly applied to a basecoated model to accentuate details and edges, which gives the model a more realistic appearance.

Virtual Insanity?

In other news, Meta né Oculus is raising the price of their Quest 2 virtual reality headsets by about 30%.

It's an unexpected decision - normally as a new technology gains a foothold, the price goes down, rather than up, and Meta has been doing its best to increase its presence in the marketplace.  So far, Meta has sold almost 15 million of the Quest 2, which represents 90% of VR headset sales to date, and you have to think that affordable pricing is a large part of the reason for their market share.

In their reluctant defence, my god, what ISN'T getting more expensive right now?

- Sid

Although probably a better choice than Portrait mode.

Since the release of its first full-colour image on July 14th, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has created a new standard for astronomical imaging.  

Located in a halo orbit around the L2 Lagrange point*,  the Webb Telescope is the most powerful space telescope ever built, and has already produced epic, breathtaking images of outer space unlike anything previously seen. I just wish that they didn't look like they were shot with the $20 starburst filter that I bought in my first year of photography classes at Ryerson.

- Sid

* Lagrange points are locations in space where the gravitational attraction of the Earth and the Sun balance out, allowing satellites to remain in a stable orbit.

Can I get an amen from the Amen Corner?

My sincere compliments to CBC's headline creation staff, "Ready Prayer One" is somewhat brilliant.

- Sid

Nostalgia.

Admiral Blackwell:  "Captain Picard Day?"

Captain Picard: "Oh uh … Yes it's a … it's … it's for the children. I'm a … I'm a role model!"

Admiral Blackwell:  "I'm sure you are. Starfleet out."

The Pegasus, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

June 16th, and we celebrate another Captain Picard Day - June 16th being the best approximation of Stardate 47457.1 that the fan base was able to calculate.  We're first introduced to this celebratory event and the Captain's reluctant involvement in the seventh and final season of The Next Generation, where Picard expresses his displeasure with the circumstances to an amused Riker in no uncertain terms.

And then, 30 years later in the first season of Picard, we see that he has preserved the banner in his personal archives at Starfleet, along with all of the other treasured memorabilia from his career and life. It's a subtle and poignant comment on how we sentimentalize the past as we age.

- Sid

Lost in time.

Honestly, I expected to just have a relaxing long weekend getaway in Whistler with my wonderful wife - we've been there before, and other than Whistler Village's unnerving evocation of the Village from the 1967 cult classic TV series The Prisoner, I really didn't think that there'd be anything blogworthy.

It took us some time to find our AirBnB, the numbering in the rental complex was surprisingly nonlinear. There must have been some kind of rational system, but we never did figure it out.  We finally found the right door, keyed in the entry code and made our way upstairs with our luggage. 

Karli had found us a pleasant little two-level condo, with an outdoor deck on each level - it says a great deal about life in Whistler that the upstairs deck was considerably larger than the living room area.  We unpacked and, while Karli was getting ready for go out for a walk around the village, I casually turned on the TV to see what was available.

I was intrigued to discover that the listings included a Classic Doctor Who channel, which was in the middle of showing The Hand of Fear, a Tom Baker episode originally broadcast in 1976.   

A little research revealed that Classic Doctor Who is part of the Britbox offering, which probably shouldn't be a huge surprise - although it's a bit confusing given that the new Doctor Who episodes are on Crave, it seems odd that they'd split them up. It seemed equally odd that it was part of whatever streaming package our host had chosen for his rental guests: with the best will in the world, not a lot of people are going to ditch their weekend plans* in favour of catching up on the full catalogue of the Doctor's classic adventures, in all of their cardboard-tube-and-bubble-wrap** special effects glory.

Although, in a way, it's not completely accurate to talk about the full catalogue of Doctor Who episodes.  There were 253 episodes of the series produced between 1963 and 1969, and 97 of them are missing.

This sounds like a tragic mistake in the era of fandom and franchises, but in the 1960s, the standards were completely different. During the 1960s, BBC productions were generally videotaped for broadcast. The tapes were quite expensive, and as such they were erased for reuse shortly after they were shown.  In fact, none of the Doctor Who episodes from the 60s have been recovered from videotape, they were all erased.

However, the episodes were also distributed internationally, and due to the differing requirements of global broadcasting, the solution of choice was to use a telecine process to transfer the episodes to film masters, which were then used to create copies for distribution.  As time went on and space ran out, many of the original masters were disposed of, but over the years, many of the copies have been recovered from archives and storage lockers all around the planet, and in some cases borrowed from the libraries of private collectors, and used to digitally recreate the episodes. 

However, the random nature of the recovery process has resulted in a number of alternative solutions for recreating missing episodes.  Animated versions have been created based on amateur audio recordings of the episodes***, and low resolution NTSC videotapes have been used as guides for colourizing scans of 16mm black and white versions. 

To illustrate the degree to which these missing episodes have become valuable items to the serious collector, twelve cans of film were discovered in Nigeria in 2013, including the full six episodes of The Enemy of the World and five missing chapters of The Web of Fear from the fifth season of Doctor Who. Before they could be shipped to the BBC, Episode 3 of The Web of Fear vanished, presumably stolen and sold to the highest bidder.

Up until now, we've somehow avoided adding Britbox to our otherwise comprehensive collective of streaming services, but now that I'm aware of the classic episodes channel, I'm giving serious consideration to signing up, so as to have a replacement for my treasured but aging selections from the BBC's DVD releases of the Doctor's classic adventures.  Hmmm...let's take a look...it IS only $9.99 a month, but would it be worth it...okay, they've got Blake's 7, Red Dwarf, Eleventh Hour, The City & The City, the 1981 version of The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy and David Tennant in The Quatermass Experiment as well, right, I'm in.

- Sid

* Nor did I.  I did watch a couple of chapters while Karli was doing other things, but I would never have suggested that we spend the next three days watching TV, however tempting it might be.

** Yes, we're looking at you, The Ark in Space.

*** I kind of love the random nature of this solution.  Imagine that you're a Doctor Who fan in the pre-VHS era, and the only way that you can display your dedication to your beloved Time Lord is by recording audio versions of the show and imagining the visuals.

"Je ne regrette rien."

You Know You're a Geek When, Part 4.

Gimli: Legolas! Two already!

Legolas: I'm on seventeen!

Gimli: Huh? I'll have no pointy-ear outscoring me! [kills another one]

Legolas: [shoots two more arrows] Nineteen!

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 

My workplace is currently going through a process of reviewing and optimizing our procedures in hopes of improving efficiency and creating a more streamlined system.  This isn't an easy process - among other issues, we're ridiculously paper-based, considering that it's 2022.  And I do mean ridiculously, I personally print over a million* pages of training support material on an annual basis.

As part of the review process, everyone has been tasked with logging their productivity on a daily basis.  It's not as onerous as it sounds, but there have been some challenges in establishing appropriate scaling for metrics.  We were discussing this during one of our morning productivity meetings, and I raised the problem of measuring quantity rather than size in terms of productivity.  Sadly, it turned out to be a bit of a weregeek moment.

"It's like the second Lord of the Rings movie, where Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf are competing to see who has the higher kill count in their various battles, right?"

Silence and blank faces.  Undeterred (and obviously unwilling to read the room) I continued:

"And at one point, Legolas takes out a huge war elephant, this gigantic tusked monster.  He slides down the trunk of the fallen creature and hops off to stand nonchalantly in front of Gimli, who frowns at him and shouts, 'That still only counts as one!'  It's the same sort of problem - we have to look at scale rather than just counting events."

More silence followed - I think that the other attendees were either puzzled, confused, embarrassed for me, or all three, I've never had more people avoid eye contact. Well, too bad, I regret nothing, it was a perfect analogy for the problem, geek reference or not - muggles.

- Sid 

*Yes, ONE MILLION, to quote Doctor Evil.

"I create myself."

Rose: I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here.

The Parting of the Ways, Doctor Who

In the first season of the 2005 Doctor Who relaunch, writer and showrunner Russell T. Davies started the idea of introducing Easter Eggs for the show's finale that would appear throughout the season.  For that first season, it was the phrase "Bad Wolf", that appeared as a project development title*, in conversational references, on posters, as a TV channel, a corporate name, and several times as graffiti. 

In the final episode, Rose Tyler, the new Doctor's first companion, gazes into the Time Vortex and becomes temporarily omnipotent.  She names herself the Bad Wolf and then broadcasts those words into her own past as a signal to herself in the future.**

Yesterday I saw bad wolf painted on a brick wall in Gastown, and a small part of me asked, "Rose...were you here?"

- Sid

* Albeit in Welsh.

** Wibbley wobbley, timey wimey...

Bakka at 50: Memories

Bakka: In Fremen legend, the weeper who mourns for all mankind.

Frank Herbert, Dune 

It's been 50 years since the Bakka Science Fiction Book Shoppe first opened its doors in 1972 under the ownership of Charles McKee, a dedicated American science fiction and comic book fan who had originally moved to Canada in protest of the war in Vietnam. The store's name comes from an obscure reference in the glossary at the end of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune - it's a bit of an inside joke, based on the fact that the term never actually makes an appearance in the novel.

The comic books section split off to its own store in 1976 as The Silver Snail, which has just recently returned to Queen Street.

My first visit to Bakka would have taken place only a couple of years later, when I was attending high school in Muskoka, Ontario's cottage country. A friend's father had some business to conduct in Toronto, and we went along for the ride, with the specific goal of making our way to Queen Street West and shopping at Bakka and the Silver Snail.  In those pre-internet days, I wouldn't have known that either store existed were it not for an article in the Toronto Star, and we looked up their addresses in a Toronto phone book at a booth on the corner of Queen and McCaul.

I did Saturday Greyhound bus shopping trips to Toronto every few months until 1983, when I moved to Toronto to attend university.  Other than a brief return to Muskoka (just long enough to buy a house, get a divorce, and sell the house) I lived in Toronto until 2005, when I relocated to Vancouver.     

That period of time saw the purchasing of the bulk of my science fiction and fantasy library.  I visited Bakka almost every weekend and bought a handful of used or new books on every visit, it would have been a rare event to have left empty handed. You could say that Bakka was my Cheers - everybody really does know your name if you shop in the same bookstore once a week for over 20 years. 

I think of the constants from that era as being John Rose (left) and Jack Brooks, generally seen shelving books in his distinctive coveralls.  John was originally hired to manage Bakka in 1979, but purchased the store a year later, and his thoughtful, knowledgeable and intelligent leadership was responsible for transitioning Bakka from something of an amateur business into a superb independent genre book store. 

After owning Bakka for over 22 years, John passed the baton to Ben Freiman in 2003, who added Phoenix to the store's name to indicate its reborn status.  Freiman moved the store to its current location on Harbord Street near the University of Toronto in 2010.
 

The cautionary truth of any sort of independent retail outlet is that it exists not only on the basis of its success in the marketplace, but as an expression of its ownership. The fact that Bakka has managed to survive for 50 years is a testament to the quality of its service, the loyalty of the science fiction and fantasy community, and most importantly to its great good fortune in the succession of dedicated and engaged owners who have kept the business going through recessions, relocations, megastore competition, digital books, and COVID-19. 

A very happy 50th birthday, Bakka - and best wishes for another 50.

- Sid