Meyer is a Mormon. Mormon women are encouraged (pressured) to get married early and reproduce as often as possible. Since women are locked out of any power positions in the church, their value in the religion is pretty much reduced to being a womb and a caretaker.
So Meyer, in her depiction of marriage and pregnancy, is quite possibly being subversive about the whole thing.
So Meyer, in her depiction of marriage and pregnancy, is quite possibly being subversive about the whole thing.
In case you don't feel like playing Pandemic 2, the game is about creating a virus to infect and kill the world, and the main focus of the game interface is a Risk-like map of the world, with each territory displaying its infection status. Infections travel around the world via ports and airports.
The game has one infamously fatal and kinda funny flaw rendering it unwinnable most of the time: Madagascar will always close its only port very early in the game, usually before the virus has even made a dent in the rest of the world. Every other country is easy to infect and kill off but humanity will always survive, thanks to the unwavering paranoia of this island nation.
The game has one infamously fatal and kinda funny flaw rendering it unwinnable most of the time: Madagascar will always close its only port very early in the game, usually before the virus has even made a dent in the rest of the world. Every other country is easy to infect and kill off but humanity will always survive, thanks to the unwavering paranoia of this island nation.
Please tell me there's a mention in the script about how Madagascar closed its ports and airports early and is considered safe. Hope the writer didn't pass up the opportunity for the obvious joke.
I would be all for a Beatles time-travel movie but I like Yoko, so here's a different approach:
Paul really did die. Blew his mind out in a car. John hired a look-alike / sound-a-like (Billy Shears) but felt guilty about hiding this from the fans so small hints were left on the albums about the change. Eventually Lennon's guilt gets the better of him. He spills the beans in 1969 and then pulls a Garbo and becomes a recluse, neither recording nor appearing in public for decades.
Fast forward to 2020 and an 80 year old Lennon, still feeling lost and alone without his old partner, is approached by a young Beatles fan who offers him the chance to fix everything. Using a newly invented time machine, elderly John and this young scientist fellow go back to 1966 and, after a bunch of screwball adventures, manage to keep Paul from having the car accident.
But, in the course of the adventures, the old John meets the young Yoko, immediately falls in love with her, gets terribly depressed when he realizes she could never love him back since he's terribly old at this point. He gets lost in the tragic thoughts that she and she alone could have saved him from all those lonely decades, so, to prevent that fate, he introduces young John to her. And so old John feels like his time on earth is done. Blew his mind out in a time machine. Which, unfortunately, had the side-effect of destroying the time machine and leaving the young scientist stranded in time.
And the scientist tries to make the best of his situation, making tons of money betting on Super Bowls, but he eventually goes completely mad and full of hatred and revenge for the one who wronged him. Finally, in 1980, he snaps, waits in ambush for John to show up, and kills him.
And the final reveal is about Paul. Paul is so shaken by his near death experience in the car accident, not to mention meeting an 80 yr old chap who claims to be John, that he secretly retires in seclusion to his country estate. But, before he permanently retires, he helps young John recruit Billy Shears to keep the Beatles going. Therefore every Beatles album in our timeline, from 1966 on, is exactly the same as the timeline where Paul was dead.
Paul really did die. Blew his mind out in a car. John hired a look-alike / sound-a-like (Billy Shears) but felt guilty about hiding this from the fans so small hints were left on the albums about the change. Eventually Lennon's guilt gets the better of him. He spills the beans in 1969 and then pulls a Garbo and becomes a recluse, neither recording nor appearing in public for decades.
Fast forward to 2020 and an 80 year old Lennon, still feeling lost and alone without his old partner, is approached by a young Beatles fan who offers him the chance to fix everything. Using a newly invented time machine, elderly John and this young scientist fellow go back to 1966 and, after a bunch of screwball adventures, manage to keep Paul from having the car accident.
But, in the course of the adventures, the old John meets the young Yoko, immediately falls in love with her, gets terribly depressed when he realizes she could never love him back since he's terribly old at this point. He gets lost in the tragic thoughts that she and she alone could have saved him from all those lonely decades, so, to prevent that fate, he introduces young John to her. And so old John feels like his time on earth is done. Blew his mind out in a time machine. Which, unfortunately, had the side-effect of destroying the time machine and leaving the young scientist stranded in time.
And the scientist tries to make the best of his situation, making tons of money betting on Super Bowls, but he eventually goes completely mad and full of hatred and revenge for the one who wronged him. Finally, in 1980, he snaps, waits in ambush for John to show up, and kills him.
And the final reveal is about Paul. Paul is so shaken by his near death experience in the car accident, not to mention meeting an 80 yr old chap who claims to be John, that he secretly retires in seclusion to his country estate. But, before he permanently retires, he helps young John recruit Billy Shears to keep the Beatles going. Therefore every Beatles album in our timeline, from 1966 on, is exactly the same as the timeline where Paul was dead.
@Chris Braak:
You should have included the link for those who might be interested in competitive mindfulness.
[bit.ly] (goes to zimbio.com)
You should have included the link for those who might be interested in competitive mindfulness.
[bit.ly] (goes to zimbio.com)
@Arken: I could see how SuperPresident would work, especially in a polarized political environment.
For example, if a superhero suddenly appeared now, in a blue leotard with the presidential seal on his chest, tall and lanky with brown skin, those on the left would be praising the president for his secret identity and for how he saved the planet from the evil robot invasion, while the tea baggers would deny this hero was really the president and would then state that Obama was secretly behind the robots and personally designed their flesh devouring tentacles.
Or the reverse would be true. Mitch McConnell would accuse the President of wasting time gallivanting around in a ridiculous bodysuit when he should be focused on budgetary issues. This accusation would be followed up by Robert Gibbs making jokes about how all black people must look the same to Mitch, and about how the President is a serious man and would never be caught dead wearing a long purple cape with a red "SP" embroidered in the middle. "As you can see from the President's schedule, he is busy fighting for the success of the START treaty and the new stimulus and recovery bill for rebuidling American cities after the evil robot attack. While I am certain the president would rather spend his days rescuing kittens from trees or pummeling demented cyborgs, he just simply does not have the time while he is concentrating on reducing unemployment."
For example, if a superhero suddenly appeared now, in a blue leotard with the presidential seal on his chest, tall and lanky with brown skin, those on the left would be praising the president for his secret identity and for how he saved the planet from the evil robot invasion, while the tea baggers would deny this hero was really the president and would then state that Obama was secretly behind the robots and personally designed their flesh devouring tentacles.
Or the reverse would be true. Mitch McConnell would accuse the President of wasting time gallivanting around in a ridiculous bodysuit when he should be focused on budgetary issues. This accusation would be followed up by Robert Gibbs making jokes about how all black people must look the same to Mitch, and about how the President is a serious man and would never be caught dead wearing a long purple cape with a red "SP" embroidered in the middle. "As you can see from the President's schedule, he is busy fighting for the success of the START treaty and the new stimulus and recovery bill for rebuidling American cities after the evil robot attack. While I am certain the president would rather spend his days rescuing kittens from trees or pummeling demented cyborgs, he just simply does not have the time while he is concentrating on reducing unemployment."
@LauraRoslinIsMyPresident:
I only watched the first half of the season, and not the episodes from 1.5 so perhaps my complaints were addressed in the unseen half.
That being said, the show had some interesting pretensions but was obviously written by people who had never played an MMO, never manipulated files on their computer, had possibly never even really used a computer other than the word processor used to write their scripts. The show wasn't very smart about anything involving technology or AI or robotics.
If anything, this show ensured smart people who knew anything about any of the above would turn the thing off in disgust, seeing that Hollywood got it wrong, once again.
All they had to do was realize certain basic things: Files can be copied. If it exists in digital form, then it can be duplicated. There's no such thing as a file which can exist in one place and one place only. There might be some sort of protection which prevents copying or opening the file anywhere, but this protection always has some vunerability and is always broken with enough dedication. If the file contains the future of your company or the ghost of your dead daughter, then you'll find a way to make a backup.
Source code can be read and modified. If you don't have the source but have the program and your company's future depends on this program being modified and workable, you reverse engineer it. If you have working code and you're against a deadline, then you duplicate the code into the hardware units you want to ship. You don't say "there's only one working model" if the hardware between the working model and the non-working is identical. You copy, test, and ship, and resolve to fix the bugs in your first patch.
MMO's want players to play for very long periods of time, in order to keep subscription money flowing. MMO's will therefore give you a way to resurrect a character who died or, at the very least, will give you the chance to re-roll a new character. They will not permaban you simply because you died in game. If a game was inexplicably popular even with a permadeath system, then the /b/tards of Caprica would have found a backdoor and would have hacked their way back in with new characters or resurrected characters. Does Caprica not have any proxies?
This is just a few of the technical problems. I could certainly go on. The funny thing is: the show could have gotten the basic technical details correct and had more interesting, more complicated stories as a result.
I only watched the first half of the season, and not the episodes from 1.5 so perhaps my complaints were addressed in the unseen half.
That being said, the show had some interesting pretensions but was obviously written by people who had never played an MMO, never manipulated files on their computer, had possibly never even really used a computer other than the word processor used to write their scripts. The show wasn't very smart about anything involving technology or AI or robotics.
If anything, this show ensured smart people who knew anything about any of the above would turn the thing off in disgust, seeing that Hollywood got it wrong, once again.
All they had to do was realize certain basic things: Files can be copied. If it exists in digital form, then it can be duplicated. There's no such thing as a file which can exist in one place and one place only. There might be some sort of protection which prevents copying or opening the file anywhere, but this protection always has some vunerability and is always broken with enough dedication. If the file contains the future of your company or the ghost of your dead daughter, then you'll find a way to make a backup.
Source code can be read and modified. If you don't have the source but have the program and your company's future depends on this program being modified and workable, you reverse engineer it. If you have working code and you're against a deadline, then you duplicate the code into the hardware units you want to ship. You don't say "there's only one working model" if the hardware between the working model and the non-working is identical. You copy, test, and ship, and resolve to fix the bugs in your first patch.
MMO's want players to play for very long periods of time, in order to keep subscription money flowing. MMO's will therefore give you a way to resurrect a character who died or, at the very least, will give you the chance to re-roll a new character. They will not permaban you simply because you died in game. If a game was inexplicably popular even with a permadeath system, then the /b/tards of Caprica would have found a backdoor and would have hacked their way back in with new characters or resurrected characters. Does Caprica not have any proxies?
This is just a few of the technical problems. I could certainly go on. The funny thing is: the show could have gotten the basic technical details correct and had more interesting, more complicated stories as a result.
@Tenno:
I think you're missing the point. Utopian schemes tend towards pure control as they try to find their way towards their promised version of "freedom". Usually it's not directly the fault of the utopian idea, but rather in the leadership who wants to maintain their power and the true believer followers who think any sacrifice is worthwhile to keep the goal in sight.
It's an interesting tension. Noble ideals often bring out the worst in humans. Not always, but often enough to be predictable. Enough to make any reasonable person deeply skeptical of the next great idea that's promising to make the world into a heaven.
I think you're missing the point. Utopian schemes tend towards pure control as they try to find their way towards their promised version of "freedom". Usually it's not directly the fault of the utopian idea, but rather in the leadership who wants to maintain their power and the true believer followers who think any sacrifice is worthwhile to keep the goal in sight.
It's an interesting tension. Noble ideals often bring out the worst in humans. Not always, but often enough to be predictable. Enough to make any reasonable person deeply skeptical of the next great idea that's promising to make the world into a heaven.
@TheAlmanac: Obviously I do. This is a wish that would probably go unfulfilled in this lifetime so the next best thing would be for Star Trek to steal the concepts. This theft would make perfect sense in the Star Trek universe since this is the direction the Federation would be evolving.
Besides, Star Trek is pretty much out of ideas and has taken the space opera thing as far as it can. It needs to try something different.
Besides, Star Trek is pretty much out of ideas and has taken the space opera thing as far as it can. It needs to try something different.
I've never advocated stealing but for a new Star Trek, I'd advocate a theft of epic proportions.
I've finally got around to reading the Culture novels and I keep thinking that the Culture is what the Federation should have been. So for the new Trek, could we please have the Federation hundreds of years beyond the era of Kirk / Picard / etc. and show the implications of a post-scarcity society that the earlier Treks just barely hinted at.
All known rivals have been assimilated or destroyed. There's peace, at least on the surface, and nobody wants for anything. Despite the utopia, there would be those who would seek out a less safe existence and the show could focus on that with occasional shore leaves on Orbitals or GSV's where there would be lots of kinky sex and snarky drones.
Have an Excession-style event start off the real story line after a couple of episodes ease the audience into the setting. I would much rather see something like this than yet-another-space-opera where we shoot at Klingons/Romulons/Borg and have inane debates about emotion vs. logic.
I've finally got around to reading the Culture novels and I keep thinking that the Culture is what the Federation should have been. So for the new Trek, could we please have the Federation hundreds of years beyond the era of Kirk / Picard / etc. and show the implications of a post-scarcity society that the earlier Treks just barely hinted at.
All known rivals have been assimilated or destroyed. There's peace, at least on the surface, and nobody wants for anything. Despite the utopia, there would be those who would seek out a less safe existence and the show could focus on that with occasional shore leaves on Orbitals or GSV's where there would be lots of kinky sex and snarky drones.
Have an Excession-style event start off the real story line after a couple of episodes ease the audience into the setting. I would much rather see something like this than yet-another-space-opera where we shoot at Klingons/Romulons/Borg and have inane debates about emotion vs. logic.
@MonstersAndRockets:
Thank you Mr. Solid Fuel Monster for saying this. Mira Furlan (aka Danielle, but she'll always be Delenn to me) is a beautiful woman who looks amazing for being 54.
And I think the "shoe face" look was intentional on the part of the actor/makeup team. She's been on the island for 17 years, gone through amazingly levels of stress, beaten down by the sun and the salt water, and the nearest store with moisturizer is a few thousand klicks away.
So Kiala, how would you expect Danielle to look? Like ever other Hollywood drama where the stranded/distressed damsel has apparently had the foresight to take her makeup bag, loofah, and shampoo+conditioner with her when she gets marooned / trapped / imprisoned? Where stress is indicated only by a few locks of hair out of place in an otherwise perfect head of hair?
@Brian Fowler:
Amen to you regarding boring presidencies.
Regarding the pre-emptive strike on Afghanistan, Rakoff wasn't bold enough with that part of history. It should have read something like this:
In August of 2001, President Gore received intelligence about imminent strikes in the US involving Bin Laden. As a result, some Arab men attending flight schools were arrested. The news of their arrests briefly made the front page news in Florida and was relegated to page A10 everywhere else. Despite some small protests from Arab-American groups alleging discrimination, the story was quickly forgotten.
In late 2003, a bombshell article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh reveals US Special Forces were operating secretly in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2002 to early 2003, and may have carried out an assassination of Bin Laden, and assisted the Northern Alliance in their fight against the Taliban. Liberals, who were already suspicious of the Gore/Lieberman administration for being too pro-corporate and too pro-military, immediately decried the move and proclaimed "This is just a move to murder innocents so he can look tough for the upcoming elections. We shoulda voted for Nader!" Republicans initially expressed their support for the actions, then expressed their suspicions regarding the timing of the attacks. Senator McCain, already beginning his second presidential bid, said: "Protecting the people of the United States is important. But didn't we learn anything from Vietnam? We should not blindly intervene in the affairs of another country which hasn't attacked us first. The United States must not be drawn into a war that it cannot win."
Despite the initial controversy, the story is quickly forgotten and Gore wins re-election handily.
Since someone earlier mentioned movie adaptations, I have to talk about my favorite one, the novelization of Escape from New York.
When the movie came out, I desperately wanted to see it but knew there was no hope since it was rated R and I was 11. So I picked up the book instead.
What a beautiful mindfuck that book was for an 11 year old. It was essentially proto-cyberpunk, painting out a broken dystopian America, with this almost unrelenting bleakness. The wasteland of New York City described in such intense detail. If I had nightmares, I would be dreaming of the drumming of the crazies in the underground tunnels, their minds blown to criminal depths by the widespread use of chemical weapons.
The book has one of the best cityscapes in the long history of dystopian sci-fi. Everything described in beautiful detail, from the zombie-esque crazies underground, to the feudalistic structure of the ruling gangs, to the chaos of the government food drops in Central Park, to small sections of town where people vainly tried to emulate the peace and normality they once had, to the brutal measures taken by the government in processing the prisoners and keeping them from escaping.
The movie pales by comparison and I was deeply disappointed when I finally got a chance to see it.
@ShadowStaarr:
Trust me, you didn't miss anything. Computers were rather expensive and completely underpowered. Want a Mac or a PC? Be prepared to spend 2,500 at a time when 24,000 was a decent, middle-class wage. (worth around 50,000 now) for a system that could be comfortably emulated on an iPhone. That 5mb hard drive feeling too small? Pay another thousand to get a magnificent 20mb model.
No cell phones, no internet for the general public. While zines were emerging and there was a healthy indie music scene, the mainstream tried to force their taste on you at a level that's unheard of today. Thriller, for example, would have been shoved down your throat 100 times a day and you would have few if any alternatives to listen to.
And on top of all this, if you were a kid in the early 80's, you get the overwhelming fear of the world ending suddenly because Reagan's pointless bellicose actions pushed the paranoid Soviets a little too far. It was a generational obsession not unlike today's thing with zombies but with the added benefit of being a realistic apocalypse that seemed just around the corner. For kids of my generation, at the time, we considered "The Day After" as a documentary of what our lives would be like in the future, not just some silly scary movie.
So fuck 80's nostalgia. The present days suck but they suck so much less.
Hill Street Blues had possibly the best compromise for arc vs. episodic. Every show would have three storylines: A,B, and C. The A story would be self-contained in the episode. The B story would resolve in 3-4 episodes. And the C story would last for the entire season.
Someone could pick up an episode in mid-stream and not be completely lost, while long-term viewers would have motivation to stick with every episode.
For me, I think HBO and Showtime do it best with their shows usually having a solid conclusion to the major storyline at each season's end. Of course, story details from one season will influence the next and there is an arc-of-sorts from season to season, but there's still quite a bit of satisfaction from having things mostly wrapped up at the end of a finite run of 12 to 15 shows, rather than having to wait years for some sort of resolution.
This also forces the writers to better plan their stories and avoids the 'making-it-up-as-we-go-along-and-clearly-have-no-idea-how-to-end-it' syndrome, otherwise known as the Battlestar Effect.
@EdaOdysseus:
Guns of the South was a wonderful book. The one detail that really made the entire book for me was how the South, and later the North, reverse-engineered the AK-47. I know thats a small detail but too much time-travel fiction has the people of the past getting all googly-eyed at the technology of the future, and in this book people acted the way people would: shock at first and then quickly adapting.
This book, despite the initially silly deus ex machina, also has the best treatment of the historical figures and what a victorious South would look like. Turtledove's later books haven't even come close to this effort.
The pen tool is far better for selections than the old magic wand. For this example, with its simple shape and plain background, the magic wand was probably ok, but I'll stick with the pen for more complicated shapes and busy backgrounds, just for the sharpness and preciseness of the cut.
The pen: it's not just for drawing any more.
In a great discussion on Metafilter about the speedy entanglement of photons, someone mentioned the ways in which various discoveries about photons could prove this universe is actually running in a simulation.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to give an opinion on the veracity of any of that, but it does make me want more sci-fi exploring this possibility, not in a fluffy Matrix-y way, but rather extrapolated from current scientific discoveries and trends.
Thinking of a world where the current science has proved to a very high degree that the world is probably simulated and this knowledge has become mainstream. How this would affect further research, how it would affect society, religion, or even daily life. People finding ways to 'hack' the simulation, finding ways to try to communicate with whoever/whatever is running it. People who feel liberated by this discovery and the people who completely lose hope because they feel like their lives aren't "real" enough any more.
Has there ever been any series or movie that gets time travel right? (Babylon 5 was probably the best time travel I've seen in series television.)
The problem with Terminator / Star Trek and even Doctor Who is the writers try to shoehorn a non-linear means of travel into a purely linear narrative.
For example, I just finished watching the 2005 Series 1 of Dr. Who for the first time. In the finale, the Doctor remarks "No one can save us. I'm the last of the Time Lords. None of them are left to come here." This statement was so ridiculous in the context, it took me completely out of the story. Sure, the Time Lords were exterminated in year X, but a time lord from year X-1 or earlier could have popped into her Tardis and come forward to save the Doctor in year Y. A time travelling race would essentially be immortal. Sure they would all die on date X, but they would continue to exist in dates of X.
And with the Terminator movies, I don't understand why there isn't a cascade effect. When your efforts fail to kill Linda Hamilton in 1984 or 1991, why not go further back. Find Linda's mother and kill her while she's pregnant. Of course, a resistance agent will show up and try to stop this. So the robot has to go further back and kill the grandmother, which leads to another resistance agent following. And so on, until I can see a robot going to a point millions of years into the past, trying to squish the first creature emerging from the ocean to walk on dry land and an agent showing up with high explosives to stop the squishing.
Sorry for the rant but writers who won't think through the implications of time travel are always a great annoyance.
Here's a interesting proposal from JMS and Bryce Zybal for a BSG-esque reboot of Star Trek. Of course Paramount turned them down and went with the pointless prequel.
It's just as well. I grew up with TOS in reruns and loved it. Liked some of TNG and DS9. But it really should just die. There's no point to it anymore.
