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.

"Under a red blood moon."

"Now that's some science fiction stuff!"

Karli Thomas

Anyone else go out to watch the total lunar eclipse tonight?

- Sid

The Omega Calculation.

 

Last night I dreamt about the end of the universe being discovered by Caltech physicist Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory - how ironic that my subconscious mind would want a show named after the start of the universe to answer the question of when it was going to end.

I have no idea where my dream came from. We did watch an episode last night, and there's been a lot of speculation as to how the show, now in its last season, is going to wrap things up, but I can't imagine that they'll take the extreme route that I created during REM sleep.

The elevator pitch for my dream is simple: Leonard is working on his own project out of envy for Sheldon and Amy's super asymmetry theory and accidentally discovers the calculus that maintains the universe, the actual math that drives the wheel of time.  However, it's not good news: he also determines that the solution to his Time Equation is finite - the wheel will cease to turn, and very soon.*

He's unable to convince anyone that he's right, and in the final moments before Time literally runs out, Leonard throws his arms around Sheldon in a final hug, and says, "Oh well, goodbye." and the screen goes black.

In the murky logic of the dreamworld, at first it was just the end of the show, then it became the real end of the world, with everything going black.  The two scientists left the university and wandered the streets, and Leonard ran around the end of a dumpster and jumped out into the rising darkness that was replacing reality.

However, Sheldon refused to accept that the world has come to an end, and thrust his consciousness back against the arrow of time in hopes of somehow finding help to change things, but the end of the world followed him back through history, erasing everything as it went.

At that point, I awoke, bleary-eyed and disconcerted in the winter morning darkness, and, to be honest, a little pleased to be able to hear the splatter of rain against the window - it was a very realistic dream considering its subject matter, although probably not a plot that Chuck Lorre is going to steal for the show's finale.

Karli, lucky woman, dreams mostly about her relatives - that must be nice.

- Sid

* I feel that some of the credit for this dream should go to James Blish, who used a similar plot concept about the end of the universe in The Triumph of Time, the fourth book in his Cities in Flight series.

The Long Dark.

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

- Carl Sagan

I’ve made a huge mistake, and I’m probably going to freeze to death because of it.

Not to worry – my IRL existence is safe, but my virtual self is in big trouble. I’m currently playing The Long Dark, a challenging survival game set in a northern Canadian environment, and making the wrong decision in the game’s virtual winter can easily be fatal.

In this case, I’ve taken some time away from the game’s storyline module to play in Survival Mode, which I’ve actually found to be more interesting than the plot-driven version. There are a lot of computer games where the name of the game is to stay alive, but generally it’s as a part of some other goal. The Long Dark strips that pretext away and reduces the gaming experience to its most fundamental challenge: survival.

 

The concept for the game, officially released in 2017 by Vancouver-based indy game developer Hinterland, is that your small plane has crashed on Great Bear Island due to a geomagnetic disaster* that has disabled all electronic and electrical devices. In the story-based version, the player attempts to solve the mystery behind the disappearance of their sole passenger following the crash. In the Survival option, the player is simply dropped into one of the nine connected maps that make up the island, where they attempt to survive in the hostile winter environment for as long as possible by raiding cabins and lumber camps for supplies and clothing, foraging for edible plants and meat from dead animals, or attempting to trap or kill the island’s wildlife. The opposition: the remorseless Canadian wilderness in wintertime.

 

The game’s interface is elegant in its simplicity. Four gauges and a health bar located at the bottom of the screen provide the player with a dynamic overview of their constantly changing statistics. There are five ways that you can die in The Long Dark: hypothermia, exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, and trauma – things like falling off a cliff or having a fatal encounter with a wolf, moose or bear.**   Cold is a constantly gnawing opponent: different weather conditions will drive the player’s temperature down to a greater or lesser degree depending on their clothing and the last time they had a hot meal, and wet snow will soak through your protective layers and reduce their efficacity.

 

The more supplies you carry, the more calories you burn, and the faster your stamina goes down. Thirst is always a problem: melted snow is an easy solution, but you need to boil it in order to avoid illness. Food offers the same danger – food poisoning from a moldy chocolate bar or uncooked deer meat will exhaust or even kill you if you don’t immediately treat the symptoms with antibiotics, rest and herbal tea.

However, the player has a variety of survival tools at their disposal. Cottages, fishing huts, trailers and abandoned vehicles contain a wide range of useful items: food, clothes, water, beds, fireplaces and stoves, simple tools such as knives or hatchets, and, most importantly, a refuge from the weather. The winter landscape is littered with firewood, edible plants such as rose hips or cattail reeds, and the occasional frozen deer carcass – a good source of meat, as well as hides that can be cured to make durable clothing, or gut that can be dried to make a bowstring.

If your archery skills are good enough, you may be able to shoot one of the winter hares that sometimes make an appearance, and if you’re very fortunate, you may find an abandoned rifle and ammo that will let you hunt for bigger game. Be careful, though – the smell of fresh meat may attract wolves or bears, and encounters with either one are likely be fatal, although lighting an emergency traffic flare will keep them at bay for a while.

My current incarnation has survived a couple of wolf attacks, and has recently had ribs broken by a charging moose who came at me a lot faster than I expected. Those broken ribs have slowed me down, but I've kept moving regardless - once resources run short in a given area, I feel a need to move on before I become desperate for food.  I'm also overladen with supplies, which can slow your progress to a crawl.  Up until now, I've been happy to trade mobility for resources, but I may begin judiciously editing down my load, in hopes of picking up some speed.

 

That aspect of gameplay is one of the few reasons that I might not recommend this game to everyone. The Long Dark requires a lot of patience. Even when unburdened by equipment and clothing, travel is time consuming, and anyone who wants to stay alive is also going to need to spend a lot of time sleeping, crafting, cooking and in some cases, just waiting out bad weather in a convenient building.  And there's a lot of bad weather to wait out - welcome to northern Canada in the winter.

The weather, good and bad, is the most impressive part of the game.  Although the game's graphics are rendered in a deliberately abstracted, hand-drawn style, the combination of visuals and sound effects create a completely plausible environment, to the point where it's hard not to shiver in your chair when the wind picks up. The game's weather physics are both evocative and – pun intended – deadly accurate. Having spent my formative years in Ontario's snow belt, I've had the dubious pleasure of experiencing the full range of winter weather: blizzards, thaws, gentle snow, fog, and -40 degree weather, when the sun is bright and the cold is like a knife in your back. The Long Dark recreates all these options far too well - it's not a surprise to discover that Hinterland is a Canadian company.

 

The game's designers are obviously happy to make their Northern connection part of the action. Maple leaf flags are a constant part of the landscape, and there are several little Canadian jokes scattered throughout the game, including a comment about leather shoes*** that would be fine for Bay Street but not for the snow, and a helpful guide to the correct pronunciation of the word “toque”. (Tuke, if you ever need to explain that phonetically.)

The Long Dark accomplishes its goals as a survival simulation so well that it's difficult to think of anything they should change.  Skis or snowshoes might be a useful option to speed up travel, and it would be interesting to include the false remedy of alcohol for those times when you're starting to shiver. There's another option that they've ignored entirely - every now and then I find the corpse of a fellow traveller who has failed the test, but unlike discovering the carcass of a deer or wolf, there's no option showing the amount of meat available for harvesting.  It's a grim reality of survival that desperate people have resorted to in the past, but perhaps it's just as well that they didn't feel a need to recognize that kind of desperation in a computer game.

That being said, my current survival situation is desperate enough. I was exploring the abandoned Carter hydroelectric dam when I innocently went through an emergency exit that put me outside in the path of a blizzard. Like most Emergency doors, there's no return access, and now I’m trapped outside: exhausted, freezing, and unable to start a fire in the howling wind and the driving snow.

Surprisingly, I manage to survive the storm. I find a spot in the lee of a storage shed where I’m able to light a fire and warm up a bit, which allows me to take a quick nap in my sleeping bag without dying from the cold. As I search for a way up to the top of the dam, I stumble upon a hidden entrance point that lets me back into the calm darkness of the facility’s generator room, where I’m able to get some real rest and bring my temperature fully up to normal.

However, my respite is short-lived - literally. A couple of days later, I'm repeatedly mauled by a bear while scouting for a route down to a river, then a wolf ignores my defensive emergency flare and finishes me off, ending 35 days and six hours of staying alive.

Oh well, as the saying goes, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.  Either way, 35 days (and six hours) is the new record to beat.  Let's see...Start A New Survival Game...

- Sid

* This may not be as unlikely a possibility as you might think, apparently the Magnetic North Pole has been moving around quite a bit recently.

** The game’s creators acknowledge that wolves rarely attack humans, and that they have exaggerated the perils of being attacked by a wild animal in the interests of game play.

*** I originally typed this as “leather shows” which might also be fine for the Bay Street finance crowd, who knows.

Reading Geek: The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

 

My 2019 resolution reading schedule was temporarily derailed today by the arrival of The Murders of Molly Southbourne, by English author Tade Thompson.  At 117 pages, it's a surprisingly thin text in the current monumental science fiction marketplace, not to mention a bit pricey at $13.75 CAD. 

Regardless, I was intrigued by the concept for the novel*:  imagine if any time you cut yourself, your spilled blood created a perfect duplicate of you that wanted to kill you.

Because I'm a quick reader, 117 pages is nothing - I was able to split the book between my bus ride home and some time on the couch after dinner while Karli watched The Bachelor, and finish it off the day it was received,

The story starts out well, and has a suitably karmic ending, but there were a few spots in the middle that didn't quite add up, and a couple of dead ends in the body of the narrative that I would like to have seen explored further.

I was also a bit disappointed to learn that Molly Southbourne's unusual condition may be caused by an experimental drug taken (in both senses of the word) by her mother - I might have been more satisfied if there had never been an explanation for the problem, just have it be a fact of her life like breathing or sleeping.

Summary:  a quick, entertaining read, with a unique and original concept, well written, with some excellent descriptive passages.  On the down side, it lacks a certain amount of internal consistency, and it might have helped the story out if Mr. Thompson had written a few more pages.  Overall, I enjoyed it for what it was, an unusual short conceptual piece, and plan to hunt down some of Mr. Thompson's other work based on my initial introduction to his style.

- Sid

* Technically speaking, it's probably a novella - according to the internet, a novella is "between 17,500 and 40,000 words", but Mr. Thompson doesn't provide a word count.

Resolution.

 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the futuristic year of 2019 - yes, I'm fully aware of all the science fiction movies set in 2019 that don't particularly match what is now the present:  Blade Runner, Daybreakers, Akira, The Island, The Running Man, and apparently The Road, although I have no recollection of the date being mentioned in either the book or the movie.*

And Dark, was Dark not set in 2019?

Regardless, with the new year upon us, I feel obliged to look at the results of last year's resolution to make a dent in my backlog of paper novels, to the tune of one a week.  As is so often the case, I didn't manage to keep up with my initial burst of enthusiasm, but if nothing else, I think that I at least managed to break even between reducing the backlog and new acquisitions.

In my defense, I did do some re-reading as well, but overall I wish that I had managed to do better than I did, the books that I did read made for entertaining additions to my repertoire. (Although, to be honest, part of the reason for my non-compliance can be blamed on a couple of books that simply did not hold my interest for a variety of reasons.)

However, it's a new year, and with that, I can make a fresh start with the same goal. I've kicked things off with The Fifth Season, the first book in N. K. Jemisin's award-winning The Broken Earth trilogy - my apologies to all of the nay-sayers who claimed that Jemisin's Best Novel Hugo wins were the result of political correctness, but as it turns out, she's actually just quite a good writer. The Fifth Season was a very good book -  imaginative, unique, clever, and well-written - and I'm looking forward to the next two in the trilogy.

Sadly, I'm retrenching in terms of visual media.  I'd love to be watching everything that's out there in the marketplace, but I feel that I'm just too far in the hole to catch up.  As such, I'm going to concentrate on core programming like Star Trek: Discovery - I never thought I'd say this, but I'm actually a bit relieved that Doctor Who is taking a hiatus for 2019, I can use the break for something else.  To be honest, I haven't even watched the New Year's special yet, hopefully I can get that out of the way before the 2020 season starts.

Right - 2020:  that will be Edge of Tomorrow, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, A Quiet Place and Reign of Fire.

Happy New Year to all!

- Sid

* And, really, when you look at that list, I have no regrets that the future has proven inadequate to those visions of it from the past.  I think that Blade Runner is the best of a bad lot in terms of possible futures from that particular collection of options.

Geekmas 2018: Epilogue.

Christmas having come and gone, I can only say that I was overwhelmed by the generosity displayed by the gifts that I received - my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved.

However, to my mild surprise, I received only a single geek-oriented gift - a mug from my friend Chris that commemorates the ill-fated Pabodie Expedition of 1930, sent forth by Maine's Miskatonic University in order to secure deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various points of the antarctic continent (as detailed in H.P. Lovecraft's The Mountains of Madness).  Thanks for keepin' the faith, Chris!

Well, as the saying goes, if you want something done, do it yourself.  I received a good range of Amazon™ gift cards - which I can certainly see as a sensible alternative to trying to coordinate selections from my gift list - and as such, I decided to pick out a few things from that list on behalf of those people.

As a result, currently en route from various locations in Amazon™'s far-flung mercantile empire are: a box set of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy; Seed of Destruction, the first Hellboy omnibus collection; The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson, a novel which has been sitting on the wish list for a couple of years; and a DVD copy of The Sword and the Sorcerer from an Amazon™ affiliate located in Germany - hopefully I correctly ordered the NTSC version.  To describe this 1982 epic fantasy as a classic really doesn't do it justice on a multitude of levels, and I'm quite looking forward to revisiting this trashy 80s TV-star vehicle.

As a spontaneous selection that was NOT on the list (prompted by Boxing Day pricing) I ordered Season One of The Expanse, the Syfy series* based on the novels and novelettes by James S. A. Corey, AKA Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.  The books are a remarkable combination of creativity and realism, and although I had some minor issues with casting, I'm hopeful that the positive fan responses that I've seen indicate that the series has managed to redeem Syfy's somewhat unfortunate record for adaptation.

Once again, my thanks to the various friends and relatives who made these purchases possible.  I hope everyone reading this had a merry Christmas, and my best wishes to all for the New Year.  Here we are again, half way out of the dark...

- Sid

* To be accurate, Syfy for the first two seasons, now an Amazon Prime™ property.

Earthrise.

Apollo 8: December 24th, 1968.

- Sid

The Birthday Trilogy, Part 4.

Photo courtesy of MasterClass

Through the combination of a real sense of purpose and an enormous amount of work on behalf of a lot of people, we can make impossible things happen.

Chris Hadfield, Masterclass

Dear Colin:

Hello again!  Sorry to hear about your cold - I hope that you can take some time off over the holidays to recover.  Also sorry to hear about the Ralph and wine disaster, which, somehow, sounds like another typical episode from the Campbell Brothers Chronicles.

It's been a few months since my thank-you note regarding your birthday gift, so I thought I should take a few minutes to bring you up to speed on progress.

I'm a little behind on the schedule that I laid out at the time, but, as John Lennon points out, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I strongly needed a break from scholastic activity after my online safety course*, and as such didn't sign up for the Chris Hadfield Masterclass on Space Exploration until just Thursday of this last week.  However, I'm now part of Commander Hadfield's virtual classroom, and I have to say that I have absolutely no regrets about my purchase.

The course is made up of just over seven and a half hours of video**, a downloadable 97 page PDF workbook which also links the student to a wide variety of pertinent content, an online discussion group, and an Office Hours module for submitting questions to the Commander.

(And, to be honest, it's the last two that really make the investment worthwhile - I'm more than confident that a quick search through the shadier parts of the Internet would have revealed an archive containing downloadable copies of both the videos and the workbook.)

I'm quite impressed by both the quality and the quantity of the course material, and as you know, I set high standards for this sort of thing. The production values for the videos are superb, and with over seven and a half hours of content, I'm looking forward to hearing the Commander's experienced and anecdotal viewpoint on being an astronaut and space exploration in general.  At this point in his career, Hadfield is a seasoned professional speaker, and his manner in front of the camera is natural and sincere - he's the perfect instructor for a course like this.

The accompanying workbook is well laid out, and the photos are an excellent bonus.  I don't think that any of the linked content is unique to the course, but the manner in which it's tied into the lesson structure gives it more relevancy than it would have as the results of a random Web search.

It's obvious that I'm not going to walk away from the last lesson and expect that NASA will add me to the next mission to the ISS, but I don't think anyone would expect that - the course is intended to offer some privileged insight into the process from the viewpoint of someone with a lot of experience from a wide variety of involvement, and as such, it's exactly what it should be.

In the case of my planned swordplay class at Vancouver's Academie Duello, procrastination actually ended up working well for me.  The centre is having a Christmas sale on their classes, and I was able to purchase a gift coupon for a Longsword Fundamentals course that brought the normal $135 fee down to $99 plus tax.  As you know, I was originally going to sign up for a January course, but the last couple of months have not been terribly cooperative in terms of gym attendance, so my new plan is to take January for a month of preparatory workouts, and then switch to longsword in February.

And that's the news, my friend.  Take care of yourself, and happy holidays to you and Jennifer!

- Sid

* Just for the record, I managed an A, with an average mark of 92%.  I might have done better if it hadn't had so much overlap with my honeymoon.

** A total which I added up on my own for 29 videos ranging in length from just under three minutes to almost 30 - and honestly, base 60 math is a nuisance.

Geekmas 2018: "... if all else fails, surprise me!"

In my Geekmas 2018 gift list posting, I provided the usual list of possible gifts, but, in a bit of a departure from previous years, I urged potential gift buyers to surprise me.  After all, it’s a big marketplace, and I’m not buying as many books as I used to, picking a novel that I don’t already own is not the challenge that it once was.

In the case of Brennan, this year’s workplace Secret Santa, he successfully accepted the challenge, and presented me with a copy of Mage Against The Machine, by Shaun Barger. It’s his first novel, and from what I can gather it’s a possibly young adult genre mix of magic and technological post-apocalyptic AI warfare.  Because it’s a first novel, I’ve got nothing to go on regarding Mr. Barger’s work, so I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s come up with.

Now all we have to do is work on the "secret" part of the process -  thanks again, Brennan, but writing your name on the gift tag does somewhat take away from the mystery of it all.

- Sid