aesmael

Feel like today hasn't gone well. Morning walk as usual, and then watching Young Frankenstein with my pet. That was fun and checked off what I had thought of as the last major Mel Brooks movie I hadn't seen (but I was only aware of Men in Tights, Blazing Saddles and The Producers otherwise [and of The Producers had only seen the remake]) so there is still a ways to go if I want to claim that accomplishment.

After that we had this week's Fatefinders game, in which our party takes a shortcut to harpies. Since the group's paladin, Jeanne, has as her trouble aspect Can't Say No To Women, I offered that for a fate point she would be completely taken in by the harpies' song and drop her sword to approach (and none of the NPCs with them were given a chance to resist either). In return I didn't ask any of the rest of the party to roll to resist and granted that automatically. Maybe this made the conflict too easy but I bet it was more fun.

Trouble came first with the special effects. I thought I'd got inputs and outputs set up to push audio effects through the call, and thought I'd confirmed this with the group, but toward the end discovered no one had heard any of it. Some panicked tweaking later and it worked for a bit? But not effectively and we were out of the action by then anyway. So overall disappointing there.

And, and, I really have got to do better at acting out the non-player characters. A lot of the time they may as well not be present in the scene at all. That's probably where most of my preparation should be going to at the moment. Next week will make a good opportunity for that, as when they took out one of the harpies they elected to have her knocked unconscious and plucked of her feathers by the wind spell, instead of killed, and now there are noises about adopting her onto their side. That's going to be quite a challenge all round.

Worse, when one player questioned whether this could be an ethical relationship between Jeanne and the harpy (now dubbed Anya), or if harpies are mere beasts, the rest of the group was pretty scornful of the question. I think I let that go on too long and worry his feelings were hurt. Got to be careful of that, and of complete digressions. Don't want to hurt people's feelings or deflate the atmosphere of the game entirely.

Been feeling pretty flat and subdued since today's game. A while after I finally managed to set up and try streaming Zork: The Great Underground Empire. Last time I tried to play I got pretty lost, so this time I had an easel and sketch pad set up with a webcam so I could draw a map of the game's layout as I explored. Of course I got lost almost immediately anyway.

Eventually I got my bearings, and found an option in Frotz to use text-to-speech, which frees me from having to read aloud the description of each room. May help me pace too, as I won't want to accumulate too long a backlog of text to read out.

Once I got underground I rapidly had a string of bad luck, with the thief robbing me of the elven sword immediately - there was I think no action I could have taken to stop this or to recover the sword. I still had a knife but this proved ineffective against the troll guarding access to most of the complex, and when trying to find an alternate path I accidentally dropped my rope down a chasm. So, frustrated, I quit thereafter. Maybe it would have been possible to recover but I have no idea how. I'm tempted to investigate this; I'm trying to play relatively unspoiled but that may prove overly ambitious of me.

It also proved to be a mistake to be idling in a voice channel on discord, marked for streaming. The rest of the gang joined in after a short while and talked over me and off-topic to the point of narrating other games they were playing, drastically hindering my ability to focus and play and enjoy doing so. Next time I won't do that, but be warned anyone who follows the link above, that will be the bulk of the hour recorded.

Tomorrow we're back to work for the week. I wonder if I will feel the energy to journal anything after getting back home.

In conversations with lost_angelwings one of the topics she has talked about, especially in relation to Star Wars (and criticism of same), is conveying narrative through fight scenes and how this can be done well or poorly.

Last night I had this in mind as I was watching a movie presented as The Protector (or more properly, Tom-Yum-Goong according to Wikipedia), which features a man named Kham who is of a line of guards protecting the King of Thailand's war elephants and who pursues poachers to Sydney, Australia when the two he is closest with (Por Yai and the calf Kohm) are kidnapped, trying to rescue and return them home. Along the way he is troubled by corrupt white Australian cops who try to kill him and large numbers of people who arrange to be beaten up him, or occasionally to beat him up.

I was not paying especial attention to the plot since most of the movie is in Thai and subtitled and I was busier with my laptop for most of the time. One part which did catch my attention is very relevant to the first paragraph of this post. About halfway through the film Kham has tracked the the people responsible to a restaurant and I was amazed to see a single shot go on four about four minutes following Kham as he fights his way in a spiral up to the top floor. He bursts into the top floor of the restaurant and demands to know where his elephants are. A small group of people come out from the back and mock him about it, shots from around the restaurant and the service counter imply the elephants have been killed, cooked and are being eaten right now. We see his despair as he takes this in and as the lead of the group, wearing white, knocks him down decisively a couple of times while he is still too stunned to defend himself, taunting him with the elephant Kohm's bell. At this we see Kham recollect himself with anger and determination, wrap the bell around his hand and beat down his opponent and others, pushing his way to the back of the restaurant where he finds numerous smuggled animals ready to be killed and served (and the elephant calf Kohm who is alive).

That scene had me rapt all the way through.

There is another somewhat similar scene toward the end when Kham finally finds Por Yai's skeleton mounted on display. He is overcome by this and knocked around helplessly by his roomful of opponents for several seconds. When he recovers himself he takes out his anger by methodically breaking the bones of each of them in turn, leaving behind a floor covered in people groaning in pain.

These are I suppose simple things to communicate in fight scenes (although I did not do them justice, I think), but seeing them so well executed helped me to appreciate the power such sequences are capable of having. It has definitely inspired me to think about how I might apply such craft to my own work.

I said I was not paying much attention except to scenes which especially caught my attention so unless I was watching the US cut (which edited this out among many other changes, and which seems likely at this time) that probably explains why I did not realise until looking it up on Wikipedia that one of the film's main villains is a transsexual woman played by a transsexual woman.

Supernova:
Dr Shepard, a famed astrophysicist discovers - all too late - that the sun's age has been miscalculated and that it will supernova in a matter of only days destroying the Earth and everything else in our solar system. When Dr Shepard disappears, his prophecy materialises as enormous solar particles start to land on Earth. Amongst the panic, a group of scientists begin the desperate search for Dr Shepard, while the government scheme to help a small group of civilians escape the coming disaster by furnishing underground bunkers to shield and protect them.
Now, we could say everything in this movie works fine because if they are positing an error in one aspect of our astronomical knowledge for the premise of this film, why not more errors to cover up everything else? But that would not be fun.

They included a shot of Sydney being destroyed. I thought that was nice, the film-makers remembered Australia and decided to include it in the destruction. Then I looked up some material on the film and discovered it was supposedly set in Australia. I'd been confused by the lack of Australian accents, locations, set dressings, demographics, or indeed anything which looked other than American. I mean, excepting shots of places like the Taj Mahal or Korea. Apparently it was actually shot in South Africa using South African actors (and a lot of Americans), which I suppose gives an indication of the attention to detail and consistency here.

"We watched for a while before we realised that it wasn't Sydney, it was Capetown and the movie was actually set there. That explains why there were so many black people in 'Sydney', why the paper money was not Australian, why the number plates on all the vehicles were not Aussie and why one of the bad guys had such a weird accent.
Other clues - a quick glimpse of a building with a Dutch name and several long shots over the blasted city showing Table Mountain clearly as a background. "

...

"Negro house maids??? Negro?? Housemaids?? And not just one but two, one for each house"

We, uh, we don't execute people either. Better stop there before I run out of space.

Now, the disaster? Maybe it is not fair to criticise it since... No, we will get there the long way. Let's admit the premise of the disaster, and that alone, say maybe we have the age of the sun wrong. Unfortunately that is still not going to get us a supernova, because our sun has far too little mass for such an event to be part of its undisturbed existence.

If they wanted to be more realistic we might have to worry about an imminent expansion to red giant but perhaps most film-makers have difficulty sustaining tension over thousands of years of story time. They'd have to have that before we would be having a supernova anyway.

Then there were those... solar meteors. They looked a lot like meteorites from Armageddon destroying cities except these supposedly were ejected from the sun. Back before I realised this was supposed to be set in Australia I thought we had a bit of a 'flat world' effect when there appeared to be simultaneous strikes in India, Australia and the United States... but that might have been meant to be Australia too. After a while of that falling the scientist figures pronounced that they'd induce a nuclear winter and render humans extinct even before the supernova.

Bunkers seem a pretty pitiful way to attempt preservation of the species. Even if the planet weren't effectively destroyed by the explosion, humans remain ultimately dependant on sunlight to survive. It would be condemning them to a slow death rather than a swift one.

But we needn't have worried, because it turns out there was a mathematical operator substitution in the equation predicting the sun's revised lifespan and therefore no disaster impending after all. The solar meteors obligingly stopped at this point, and then the nuclear winter was rained out of the sky but not before a family had to fight off a serial killer (awful lot of handguns for Australia, btw).

In conclusion: o.O

I think the most saddening aspect was looking it up on IMDB and finding a couple of posts insisting on the movie's plausibility, one from someone claiming to have an interest in science. At least it is followed by Conan the Barbarian, which has the advantage of being set in a fictional time in a fictional place and not giving me any cause to think it might have been meant to be taken seriously.

Which school of not acting do you subscribe to? Will Smith or Keanu Reeves or other?

Just finished watching Dr. Strangelove for the first time. There is a terrible beauty to it.

Bored with that titling system. Let's leave it blank for now.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars

1. Thoughts on Day One of the DNC [Maybe I should amalgamate all the Scienceblogs postings under a single heading. I find something vaguely distasteful about this and the last post from here. Maybe it is an air of self-congratulation.]
2. Effete Hollywood Elitists for McCain

Google Reader Shared Items

1. The Future of Books [via soltice. Was expecting "E-books: Yea or abomination?" Instead, Pretty.]
2. Laser pointers banned in New South Wales after rash of attacks on pilots [via soltice. But I want one.]
3. Super Mario Girls [via soltice. Cute, yes. Not everything needs to be done with sex appeal in mind though. And since when are "fluffy clouds with faces and bubbly turtles and blocky landscapes" unmanly? But I like the picture.]
4. Cat 5 wedding rings help nerds couple [via soltice. I, uh, don't know what these actually do.]
5. Moe Angel with Headphones [via soltice. Cute cute cute! *save*]
6. Bioware devs debate whether Wii is part of gaming [via gentle_gamer. It seems an odd question to me, since the Wii seems clearly a device for playing games, but the post is just a quick summary linking to an interview. No, wait. That was a preface too. Interview here. There are lots of words there at the beginning but I am not entirely sure these people are saying anything... a bit like reading some Post-Modern discourse. It seems like an interesting question though: what counts as gaming? I want to say "playing a game". This talk of narrative... that seems like something else to me. Something called 'narrative'. Describing the experience of playing a Wii as "toy-like", or making a distinction with sports such as tennis, this seems to me like an attempt to mark gaming as a particular kind of experience, a particular approach to an activity. I think what is being gotten at is a degree of seriousness and immersion. I think it probably does constitute a bundle of approaches, any subset of which can apply at a given time, and what the Bioware folks are talking about constitutes one of these subsets. Although reading to the end of the page I think I misunderstood them a bit. I am being vague because I am tired. Possibly follow up later with input from others?]
7. Celebrate Mario Kart Wii with alternate karts, Wii wheel substitutions [via gentle_gamer. Funny.]
8. Working NES squeezed into ... an NES cartridge [via gentle_gamer. Wow, neat! This title messes with my ideas of how it should be pronounced.]
9. SIU responds to anti-feminist email [via gentle_gamer. Oh, wow! It feels so rare to see such a desirable response, it can get disheartening.]
10. The Fag Bug is back! [via gentle_gamer. That's a pretty creative and great response to vandalism. Interesting seeing the change in tone of people's responses between the first post, in which Erin Davies starts her mission, and the second post, in which it is revealed she is getting a book and film deal out of this.]

Gmail Web Clip clickings

1. David Wain Moves From Wainy Days to Role Models [Who is this guy? Why do I care what he does? I fear curiosity clicking from gmail has gotten the better of me...]
2. Time to "Free the Airwaves" [Google would like people to be activist on their behalf.]
3. Top Fun Date Ideas [These are not romantic? My idea of a going-somewhere date is to do something we will enjoy, so these seem more like standard date ideas than special fun ones. Admittedly I have been on very few dates in my life, but this makes it seem like something which is supposed to be very restrained in ways which are not interesting to me. At least now I know what an Interpretive Center is.*]

Respectful Insolence

1. "To kill and cure cancer, you must first understand it" [Orac is as ever verbose.]

Signout

1. The luxury of time [I've not encountered this blog before. This is... fascinating. Not much to say because processing.]

Uncertain Principles

1. It's 4am [Labs are not supposed to be flooded. Unless you work in underseaology.]

My assignment is as done as it is getting, so I sleep now. Test in five hours.

*This whole response reads like something which I would respond to in someone else with scorn, as if they are trying to show off how special and above ordinary concerns they are. Ah well.

Watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Professor, when talking with the children on the possible truthfulness of Lucy's tale of Narnia, used the same 'Lunatic, liar or Lord' argument I am told C. S. Lewis used as an argument for Jesus as Christ.

Now I am wondering if this is from the novel or if it were added in to the film. It never seemed a convincing argument, since there seemed far too much unexamined space in the first two parts of the trilemma. I have not yet seen Lewis' own formulation, though (beyond this).

    Watched it for the first time last night. It was just as tangentially related to the source material as I expected and bore, in my opinion, closer resemblance to Caves of Steel and Caliban than I, Robot. Very surprised to discover the central character was not named Elijah Bailey (just looked it up; I am terrible with character names in film).
    What I think annoyed me most was that they made Susan Calvin into the sidekick. She is a brilliant robopsychologist, not someone who needs Hansel & Gretel explained to her, nor a person who needs constant saving. She was one of my childhood heroes and it was painful seeing her made a foil to the protagonist.
    I suppose there is no market for science fiction detective stories.
    The truth is, I did not actually pay much attention to the film. It simply was not interesting. I only watched it to compare with the original collection

    Now I suppose I should scrounge around for a copy to reassure myself that Susan really was intelligent, perceptive, sharp... I remember her as being middle-aged too, although she has been older and younger in stories. *sigh* She did have a nice coat.

    The rest of the film is very rantable too. I do not think I can consider this film for what it is or tried to be; it reminds me too much of what it is not.

    I am disappointed. Not only is it more horribly sexist than I remembered, I was looking forward to seeing how the stories were cut together since I had previously seen them only separately on DVD. Unfortunately they are not intercut at all. The one exception is that Hartigan's story bookend's the film in a way that specifically violates continuity (Kevin is dead dead DEAD by that point!).
    *sigh* All that speculation on my part about the precise ordering of scenes and they did not even bother.