Nitpickery: Tron

Hey y'all.  I saw Tron again for the first time in years.  Last time I saw it was so many years ago that I barely remembered anything about it before.  It's nice to get a good look at it again and see what so many adults saw in it.

First of all, let me say that I like this movie.  The fact that I'm going to nitpick it does not change the fact that I really do like it.  It had a lot of fun elements, and it has that "retrofuture" look that I like so much.  The digital effects are deliciously dated and colorful, the metaphors were interesting, and it had a nice, slow introduction that most modern movies don't let themselves have time for.  The dudes in today's Hollywood seem to have forgotten that it's perfectly fine to set the scene before making the story go forward.

I do have a nitpick about the graphics, due to them being on the DVD rather than original VHS.  I don't like it when old graphics are "upgraded".  When the old graphics are shown as they are, they merely look like a different, strange art style.  When the old stuff is digitally cleaned up, it looks pretty dumb.  Though for the most part, the Tron cleaner-uppers did a much better job than the people who recently cleaned up the Star Trek episodes on Netflix.  If you watch the Netflix Star Trek episodes, it's very, very easy to see that the Enterprise is merely a toy.  On Tron, however, the only thing that really suffered too much was the solar sailor and a few other bits and pieces.

Quick summary: Kevin Flynn is a game designer whose works were stolen by a man named Dillinger, who then used the games to take over a gaming company.  Alan and Lora, two people who work for Dillinger, are disturbed by Dillinger's defense of a computer system called the Master Control Program, an artificial intelligence that has grown intelligent enough to want to hack into the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, inside the computer itself, the society made of sentient programs is being oppressed by Master Control.  They're forced to play games that usually end with one or more programs "de-rezzing" -- dying.  Kevin Flynn hacks into a company computer to get evidence that his game ideas were stolen, but then is zapped by a laser and sent into the digital side of things.  There, he and various computer programs are forced to play video games, and the loser dies.

Write Club: Things Not to Do

Hey y'all.  This is going to be the first of what I suspect will be an ongoing series of little things -- or not so little things -- writers do that are so dang irritating.  Sometimes it's so bad that I just can't keep reading. 

One of the things a writer can do to alienate the reader is talk to them as if they're children.  Even in children's books, this is unbearably irritating.  Y'know, when writers treat the simplest, most trivial metaphors are all dang clever.  And acting as if they know everything and have to make it much simpler sounding so you'll understand.

This is what Michael Coren, author of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Man who Created Lord of the Rings, has done.  Ugh.  There's nothing that can prove my point better than some quotes.  Here's the quote from the introduction, where Coren is talking about a survey done where Britain is trying to find out what book people feel is the greatest book of the twentieth century for England.  Of course, given the book, the survey obviously shows that LOTR won.  Coren then mentions some people who disagreed with the survey, calling them elites.

Nitpickery -- Firefly

Hey y'all.  Do you like sci fi shows?  Then I suppose you've heard about this one show called Firefly, which lasted only one season, and had a movie.  I believe it was the Fox network that cancelled it, if I'm not mistaken.  Now, Fox is notorious for cancelling stuff, but this time, you have to wonder if they did it right.

Of course, you might be one of those fans that can see no wrong in Firefly.  I ask you at this time to set aside your enjoyment of the show and consider what I'm saying for a bit.  After all, it's good to see the other side of things once in a while, and it's always possible to enjoy something that isn't perfect.  For example, there apparently was once a blogger who claimed Captain Picard was a wuss.  Instead of getting offended, I examined some episodes of Star Trek: TNG to see.  He's not a coward, but he did have a hard time getting Deanna Troi's mother to leave the transporter room, and acts as if he's got no spine whenever she's mentioned.

But this isn't about Star Trek.  In fact, it's really unfair to compare Firefly to Star Trek, so I'm not going to do that...for the most part.  There's some storytelling aspects that are acceptable to compare.  However, Trek is generally idealistic and Firefly isn't, so I won't compare a lot.

So anyway, this series is the story of several future people flying around in their spaceship Serenity, doing various jobs legal and illegal, whatever happens to come their way and will earn them money.  They have to stay far away from the central planets, because the big ol' government has taken over and of course cannot be trusted.

Hm.  I wonder if that's a stereotype...

Nitpickery: Heaven's Devils

Hey y'all.

Have you ever read a book and wonder how it got published?  The first time I did that (other than with school books...guh) was when I was reading Mary Higgins Clark.  She comes up with really great premises, like a criminal investigator who sees a victim that looks just like her, but the execution of it wasn't that great.  The endings are just too nice, wrapped up in a perfect little bow.

This is my official apology to Mary Higgins Clark.  She only somewhat deserved the things I thought about her, and even then people really do like endings with perfect little bows.  How else do you explain romance novels?  Just because her endings are that way doesn't mean she can't write.  She's able to connect with the readers through emotion, and that's got to count for something.

And that brings us to a recent read of mine: Heaven's Devils by William C. Dietz.  This is an official Starcraft fanfiction, and it's aimed to give us Raynor's backstory.  At least it....tried.

How to Make a Star Fox Sequel

Hey y'all.  So I've been watching let's plays of Star Fox let's plays lately, and now I'm watching Star Fox Assault.  It's really boring.  To watch anyway.  I'm not really going to get into a review of SFAs, but I'll just say that it's a bit lacking.  If you're trying to make Star Fox recover from that "Adventures" debacle, then maybe you should add features rather than cut them.

So a quick summary.  Assault was at least a little less ridiculous than Adventures.  You get to go more into the arwing, but there are a lot of foot and landmaster (tank) missions.  However, there is only one route to go, which is a betrayal of the main Star Fox gameplay.  The voice acting is annoying for several characters, and even where it's acceptable it just doesn't sound anything like the previous incarnations of those characters: Wolf and Leon in particular.  Also, the lines that they're given are very dumb, and the mission briefings are needlessly goofy.  And General Pepper has really creepy eyes.

But, on the plus side, it has good gameplay....hey, is that Fox standing on a wing of a space vehicle?  ...Okay...that's...logical.  Well, this is a video game, and it does look kinda fun.

That's not what this blog is about.  It's just that, while I've been watching the let's plays, I've been thinking of some ways to make the Star Fox franchise find its way again.

Beyond the Scope

Hey y'all.  So this is kinda beyond the scope of this blog, but it was just something I was thinking about, and well, this blog is for stuff I think about.

So I was thinking about atheism.  I like to think a lot, because I'm INTP, and apparently that's the thing we like to do best.  In any case, I was thinking about it, and it occurs to me that the big bang and evolution don't really matter.  Christians don't like evolution because it's supposed to "science away" God (which it doesn't, because it's possible to believe in both or neither), but then it occurred to me that it doesn't really matter if evolution is true or not.  Who gives a crap?  I mean, Christians care because by attacking one part of the theology the atheists are trying to attack the rest, but is such an attack really relevant?

The point of this lays in atheism itself.  The thing about atheism is that it's a negative belief system.  No, not negative as in pessimistic, but because it is based on a negative: there is no God.  There is no positive or additive side to atheism.  It holds that someone else's belief is untrue, and that's about it.

So say you one day decide to become an atheist.  Okay, then what?  What do you do next?  How are you supposed to live?  What gives life meaning?  What's the purpose of life?

It gets even harder for people like me.  INTPs don't exactly get along well with others, being so internal and so focused on fixing problems rather than making friends.  What good does atheism do me?  If there's no God, then the social struggles I go through are nothing.  I have no purpose, no point.  And all those people who make fun of me can rightfully do so, because they are better looking, better dressed, and have better skills than just simply thinking about random stuff for the fun of it.  And they enjoy movies better because they don't have to nitpick.

Even if I was a successful person with lots of friends, what does atheism offer me, other than freedom from morality?  Once I die, it's all gone, and there will have been no point in anything I've ever done, whether that be riches fame, or whatever.  Even if I do good for others, what does that matter?

Let's say I save a country from an oppressive regime -- shoot ahead to the extreme, y'know?  Saving a nation doesn't last forever.  It can just get conquered again.  Or maybe it becomes a morally depraved, glitz and glam shallow society.  Or maybe it turns into one of those dystopian stereotypes Hollywood likes so much.  Or maybe the relative safety of my newly saved country ends up being the home base of the next Stalin or Hitler, because it's just too dang nice to execute people.

So what I'm saying is, there's nothing you can do that can't be destroyed.  Isn't that the second law of thermodynamics?  Everything is in a state of decay.  It'd be kinda nice to know that there's a heaven somewhere, and that stuff there actually lasts.

So that's my rant for today.

How to Doom Your Sequel: Star Fox Adventures

Hey y'all.  So I've been watching let's plays of all the Star Fox games, because it's a great series.  Star Fox is  the story of anthropomorphic animals who save the universe from the evils of the great monkey robot genius Andross, who is constantly trying to take over everything.

Of course, it was a great series before things went horribly wrong.  Obligatory summary-ho!  Just a short one, though.  I get pretty sick of recapping something when I really want to be talking about something else.

Anyway, the glory of the first Star Fox game was in its simplicity.  It's basically where you play as Fox McCloud, a fighter pilot, and you have to fight your way through a path to the planet Venom where you must defeat the evil scientist/robot/monkey Andross.  This is a lot of fun, especially since the graphics on the SNES where so blocky and "retrofuture" -- what the past thought the future would be like.  It seriously reminds me of old sci-fi book covers.

In 2007, I once read an old book where kids from the fifties went into the year 2007.  So, um, why don't we have flying cars again?  Um, yeah.  Retrofuture.