Similarly, I am also very good with animals and provide obscure knowledge to help advance the plot.

Is this not the best engagement announcement ever?  

I had originally planned to propose to Karli on the Eiffel Tower in October (because I felt that if you're going to propose, you should do it someplace memorable and romantic) but October and Paris were both a long way away, and it was just the right moment last Thursday night.  As a result, going forward I will refer to my fiancée rather than my girlfriend.

The good news is that Paris will now be part of our honeymoon, rather than the cause of one.

  - Sid

Pop!

Although my girlfriend Karli isn't an old school geek like I am, she's not completely without street cred in the area of fandom.  She's a loyal watcher of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, and also follows Talking Dead host Chris Hardwick through social media.

As a result, she took note when Mr. Hardwick and his wife Lydia recently visited the Pacific Northwest and made a stop at the Funko head offices in Everett, Washington.  Intrigued to discover the unexpected existence of this nearby geek El Dorado, we decided to pay their storefront location a visit as part of a weekend getaway to Seattle.

***

It's an overcast Friday morning as we hit the road for the United States - and Everett.  A quick breakfast stop at Tim Horton's, and we're headed south.

The rain holds off until we reach the border.  In one of those odd bits of happenstance that no one would ever believe in a movie, Madonna's Borderline plays on the radio as we go through US Customs and continue on Interstate 5.

As a non-driver, it's my job to act as navigator when in locations where roaming fees make Apple Maps directions impractical. I guide us to Exit 194 and along Everett Avenue to the centre of the city.

Studying the map, I say, "Turn left and it's along here someplace."

Karli turns the corner and dryly comments, "I think I see it."

Her tone of voice is instantly explained as I look up from the map. Suffice it to say that it's unlikely that anyone will mistake the Funko head offices for Everett's city hall.

 

What, you ask, is Funko?  It's possible that you don't know who I'm talking about, but it would be a surprise to discover that anyone reading this could be completely unfamiliar with Funko's signature Pop! figure line. If you don't own one of these blank-faced three and three quarter inch vinyl collectables yourself, you very likely know someone who does. Since its modest four-character introduction at San Diego Comic-Con in 2010, the Pop! catalogue has expanded to fill virtually every niche in the pop culture market, with more than 3,000 different Pop! figures currently available.

As the Funko website quite accurately points out, everyone is a fan of something. By cleverly going beyond the limitations of genre fandom, Funko has been able to reach a much larger audience with its Pop! actors, musicians and sports figures.  After all, why shouldn't people who love the Ramones or Golden Girls* have the same opportunities for collectables as fans of Thor and Wonder Woman?

Their 17,000 foot retail store, which opened in Everett in August of 2017, is a fully featured showcase for the Funko retail line. Different parts of the store are dedicated to particular fandoms - Harry Potter, Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel, Disney - with life-sized** versions of the Pop! and Adorbz figures decorating each section.

 

 

The store is not just about figures.  It also offers a full range of Funko-themed t-shirts, backpacks, bags, pencil toppers, key chains, stuffed toys, and all the other bits and pieces of merch that warm a fan's heart - and empty their wallet.  The store also features limited edition items that are only available there.

 

There's also a Pop! Factory section where visitors can build their own Pop! people or monsters from a selection of heads, bodies, hands, and accessories.

 

Funko's attention to detail is impressive, to the point that the standard Funko brown-paper shopping bag perfectly holds two of the Pop! Figure boxes beside each other. Adding a third box horizontally fills the bag exactly to the top, indicating that Funko has a pretty good idea of what's buttering their bread.

We discover this bit of trivia by, of course, buying some figures. Karli picks up the mixed bag (no pun intended) of Wonder Woman and Joey Ramone. To be honest, I'm actually not in love with the aesthetic of the Pop! figures, but I still end up purchasing a glow-in-the-dark Pop! version of the original Tron from the 1982 movie.

Because, after all, everyone's a fan of something.

  - Sid

P.S. If you want to create a Pop! version of yourself like the one of me at the top of this posting, the Funko website has a Pop! Yourself page.


* Or both, that may be a thing for someone - in fact, Karli may belong on that list.

** If that's the right way to describe it.

Texts.

My Ursula K. Le Guin story

When I was living in Toronto, I was a frequent flyer at the annual International Festival of Authors. Over the years that I attended, I was privileged to see some of the great names of science fiction and fantasy, including Samuel R. Delany, L. Sprague de Camp, William Gibson, and, to my great good fortune, Ursula K. Le Guin. When her appearance at the Festival in October of 2000 was announced, I instantly purchased a ticket, and when the date arrived, hurried down to the venue at Harbourfront Centre so as to obtain a good seat.  Successfully seated in the lower centre of the theatre, I eagerly waited for the evening to begin.

I'm sorry to say that Australian author Robert Drewe, the first of the three authors on the program that evening, didn't impress me - the writing was acceptable, but he was obviously a bit nervous to be reading it to an audience.  Aleksandar Hemon, who read next, delivered a fabulously entertaining anecdote about teaching Canadian Literature in Russia when he was younger - and making it all up. (Because, really, how would anyone in Russia know, before the internet?)

Finally, Ursula K. Le Guin came to the podium.  I was surprised a bit by her stature - she was quite small - and her voice: she had a mild lisp. She announced that she was going to do a reading from Searoads, a collection of short fiction set in a small seaside community in the Pacific Northwest.  The piece she had chosen was called Texts, describing the experience of a woman who reads the words left behind in the foam from ocean waves.

It says a great deal about the experience that I am able to remember what she read.  Normally my personal memory is a thing of impressions and sensations, sensual rather than factual* yet I’m able to evoke a clear memory of Ursula K. Le Guin reading aloud her description of the language of the sea foam:

Do I want to know what the sea writes, she thought, but at the same time she was already reading the foam, which although in vaguely cuneiform blobs was perfectly legible as she walked along beside it. "Yes," it read, "esse hes hetu tokye to' ossusess ekyes.  Seham hute' u."

Utterly without my planning it, my subconscious mind had selected my second-hand copy of Le Guin's award winning The Left Hand of Darkness as reading material for the day. The previous owner had apparently been using it as a study text for a course of some sort (or was an extraordinarily thoughtful reader*) and as such my copy was liberally decorated with marginalia and annotations that illustrated the more significant themes and motifs of the novel.  When it was announced that Ms. Le Guin would be available for autographs after the event, I somewhat nervously decided to get in line with my battered book.

 

When I reached the front of the line, she smiled sweetly at me and asked me in her quiet lisp what I had for her to sign.  I stammered out my little anecdote about the annotated text, and showed her the flyleaf as an example. She smiled at me again and said, "With books like this, I always sign them left handed and mirror reversed."  Switching hands, she rapidly signed the title page as below, which, when you flip it horizontally, is recognizably her name.

As you can see, I still have the book, although it's showing signs of age almost 20 years later  - but then, aren't we all?

And that's my Ursula K. Le Guin story.

- Sid

* Which is why if anyone asks me casually how old my sister Dorothy is, I say "Early sixties" rather than remembering that she was born in 1954.  Which I had to look up.

** This is not as unlikely as it sounds.  I loaned a book to my friend Laurie at some point, and when she apologetically returned it (after belatedly realizing that it was a loan rather than a gift) I was amazed to find that she'd used a yellow highlighter to mark the more significant paragraphs.  I've no idea why - I'm reasonably certain I didn't say that there would be a test.

The Farthest Shore

“For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

I was saddened to learn from my friend Chris on Tuesday that veteran science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin had passed away.  Not surprised - when someone has reached the age of 88, the news of their death is unlikely to be surprising - but certainly sad.  Ursula K. Le Guin was a remarkable presence in the world, and her departure is an enormous loss.

I've given a lot of thought about what to say in regards to Le Guin's passing, and it all seems clichéd and banal in the light of her personality and her work.  She was a powerful, brilliant, imaginative, thoughtful, witty, evocative author whose writing was both moving and literally thought-provoking. Much of her work fell under the umbrella of fantasy or science fiction, which is why I had the good fortune to discover her, but so much of it defied definition.  Regardless of genre, her skill and craft as a writer was extraordinary, with not a word wasted or misused, and the world of letters - and the world in general - is diminished by her departure.

If you have not had the pleasure of reading anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, I strongly recommend that you do.  It doesn't matter what.  A quick search through Google™ will give you a list representing her more popular pieces, but that's just a guideline, reading anything that she wrote will be equally rewarding.  I suspect that her shopping lists were probably more entertaining and absorbing - and better written - than a lot of books by better known authors.  The only introduction I will give her is from her own words as used in introducing another author:

Here are
Some real stories.

  - Sid

Seriously, can you imagine?

"Aliens, I would be, like, the best person ever with the aliens, unless they were illegal
aliens from Mexico, or Haitians..."

  - Sid

(I generally don't just repost things from the internet, but, again, seriously, how in the world would this scenario play out?)

Credit to: The Gentleman's Armchair.

Or Vanilla Coke and Barbecue Lays.

 

Sigh...

As we get into the dark and the wet that characterizes winter in British Columbia, after a challenging year of work, with another challenging year looming in the future, there are days when I just want to stay home, drink tea, eat cookies, and read comic books.

  - Sid

"Begun the Clone War has."

 

Most people have the misconception that cloning produces an exact copy
of a person, when in reality, Original Taylor couldn't stand hockey.

  - Sid

P.S. Seriously, though, this is one of the great pop culture scientific misunderstandings. Unless you have technology to record and rewrite someone's consciousness and memories, all you get a new person who looks the same. In fact, without some careful DNA manipulation, you don't even get a close match - which is why siblings who share a common genetic source don't look exactly the same.

"Let the past die."

This is not going to go the way you think!

Luke Skywalker, The Last Jedi

(Nota bene: There are some spoilers in this posting.  Some people might consider them to be large spoilers, but from a certain point of view*, they're actually quite small.  Regardless, they are spoilers.)

So, at last**, my comments on The Last Jedi. 

It was okay.

For a Star Wars movie, that's an epic condemnation. This is one of the longest running and certainly the most profitable franchises in the history of franchises - in fact, you can almost consider it to BE the history of franchises - and as such, the expectation is that it will entertain, astonish, and touch the audience.

Which it does, from time to time. Sadly, it also confused and irritated, which is not a good combination for any movie.

To be fair, there were parts of this movie that I loved. It's full of excellent performances and great bits of sly humour, much of which comes from Luke Skywalker.

I was unexpectedly touched to see Luke return to the story. It’s been 34 years since Mark Hamill last played this part, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how much of the naïve farm boy from Tatooine remained in his performance, and disappointed to discover that he's unlikely to appear in the next film.  It would have been gratifying to see Luke's character develop based on his experience in this episode, perhaps finally fulfilling his destiny and bringing balance to the Force.

In his absence, there are other candidates for the role of redeemer. The Force-powered long-distance relationship between Kylo Ren and Rey was brilliant, and the chemistry that builds between the two characters bodes well for the conclusion to the trilogy.  Kylo Ren is one of the better parts of the movie: the character showed unexpected depth, and in some ways I'm finding his story to be more interesting than Rey's. And, yes, the question of Rey's background is answered, in a fashion that perfectly matches the theme of this movie and sets the character free.

In fact, that's the most unexpected thing that this film does: it deliberately cuts ties to the past.  As characters from the other movies become fewer and fewer***, we are presented with a story that, as Luke says, will not go the way that we think.

However, the good parts of The Last Jedi are strongly overshadowed by the flaws, large and small.

The plot has a terrible Rosebud**** error, where a character has knowledge that he is explicitly unable to have based on the timeline of the film, and a pointless subplot regarding an authority struggle in the Resistance that seems to take place only for the purposes of conflict between characters.  People have done their best to explain these problems, but really, if your plot points need defending after the event, something has gone a bit wrong with your story.

Similarly, the Canto Bight sequence has been strenuously debated after the fact. I appreciated the points being made in the segment, but let's be honest, it did nothing to advance the plot - if anything, it took up time that could have been better spent elsewhere, perhaps with Luke and Rey.

 

There are also a lot of little problems, things that don't quite work:  Maz Kanata's odd cameo (who IS holding the camera for that?); the sudden discovery that light speed vehicles can be a weapon, Phasma's wasted potential as a character; Snoke's back story; people flipping over between shots; and a score of other flaws and missed opportunities.

And, last and least, the blatant children's-toy-marketability of the porgs was almost insulting.  Ewoks were bad enough, Jar Jar Binks is legendary for the negative fan response that he received, but porgs were such obvious product placement that they might as well have been drinking Coke™.

Large and important things happen in The Last Jedi, and it beautifully sets up the question of what will happen next.  And it's already made well over a billion dollars - $1.27 billion at the time I'm typing this, a huge success by any standard.  I just wish that I'd liked it more.

  - Sid

*  Did everyone see what I did there?  If not, Google away, it's an Obi-Wan Kenobi joke.

** https://theinfiniterevolution.blogspot.ca/2016/03/is-it-okay-to-call-you-bill.html

*** With that in mind, I was surprised that they didn't take advantage of a clear opportunity to remove Leia from the story.  Shooting for The Last Jedi had finished several months before Carrie Fisher's death at the end of 2016, but post-production on the film didn't finish until September of this year.  That would have given them lots of time to do a minor rewrite, one that would have actually made a lot of sense, building on the events of The Force Awakens to further establish Kylo's desire to turn his back on the past and be his own person. It's admirable that instead of taking the easy way out, the producers decided to leave Ms. Fisher's last performance untouched.

**** In case you're not a movie scholar, in the film Citizen Kane, a reporter spends the entire film trying to determine the significance of Kane's final word:  "Rosebud".  Unfortunately, he dies alone, and as such, no one would know what he said.  Various people have tried to explain this in various ways over the years - and various people are trying to explain the flaw in The Last Jedi in a similar fashion.

"Time to leave the battlefield."

 

"A life this long – do you understand what it is? It’s a battlefield, like this one… and it’s empty. Because everyone else has fallen."

The Doctor, Twice Upon a Time

And so, with the 2017 Doctor Who Christmas Special, we say a poignant, introspective goodbye to Peter Capaldi's Doctor: not fighting the Cybermen, not struggling with the Daleks, not foiling an evil plan, but simply hoping to save a life that would have been lost to the tyranny of war, mixed with the Shakespearean question of whether to be or not to be.

The episode introduces the idea that a Time Lord might deliberately refuse to regenerate, and by so doing, succumb to whatever death has initiated the process.  It also sharply reminds us of what the Doctor has lost over time, the manner in which both friends and foes have fallen by the wayside, finally leaving nothing but memories - a metaphor which is clearly illustrated by the avatars generated by the memory-harvesting Testimony, a ship created by scientists in the far distant future.

As Bill Potts' glassy avatar reflectively points out during the episode, letting go of the Doctor is hard.  It's been fun watching Capaldi and the writers move his Doctor away from the stiff, formal character of his first appearance, adding sunglasses, hoodies and Doc Martins to his wardrobe, and the electric guitar* to his repertoire. (Not to mention his increasingly unruly hair as the series went on.)

It's been equally rewarding to admire Capaldi's skill as an actor. I've talked before about the partnership between writer and performer, and the writers' need to work with each new actor's specific talents while being faithful to the character of the Doctor.  In Capaldi, the writers were presented with an experienced actor who had obviously developed his craft over time, and took full advantage of Capaldi's impressive ability to imbue his performance with emotion and power.

That ability was immediately evident in his first full episode, where his contemplations on the process of re-creation and replacement resonated strongly with the Doctor's own existence, and the writers were smart enough see what they'd been given and to take advantage of it. Capaldi's tenure was marked by resonant soliloquies and emotional monologues, or exchanges such as his epic, unforgettable rant on war from The Zygon Inversion in his second season.


Capaldi's final scene pays tribute to both his Doctor, and the Doctors who had come before him.  He finally decides to give in to regeneration, and as he readies himself for the change, he delivers a reflective, touching retrospective on how the next Doctor should lead his life, followed by the long-awaited appearance of Jody Whittaker, whose first word as the Doctor is, quite aptly, "Brilliant..."

 

One could assume that the Doctor's youthful regeneration is an unconscious response to his decision not to end his existence, and perhaps this will be addressed in the new season.  Sadly, we will have to wait a while for the answer to that question, or indeed any questions about the new Doctor.  The BBC, after presenting the most anticipated regeneration in the history of the show, decided that they should wait until the fall of 2018 to start the new season of Doctor Who.

 

Wait, did we not just go through exactly the same process waiting for the 2017 season? (Because there wasn't one in 2016?)  Coincidentally, Game of Thrones has also delayed their next season  - until 2019 - and both shows are doing a reduced number of episodes.  Ah, the confidence that all of these people have in the loyalty of their fandom - hopefully it's well placed.  Careful, though:  the Star Wars producers seem to be fully capable of popping out a movie once a year like clockwork, and it's a well known fact that the Dark Side has cookies.

Not a threat, just a warning...

  - Sid

*Which he comes by honestly - it's a well known part of Capaldi's biography that he was in a punk band called Dreamboys with Craig Ferguson (yes, that Craig Ferguson) circa 1980.