RPG Articles

I think that last name is keeping this dude down. I can’t even look directly at it without feeling a little vertigo.

As I read this I found myself thinking “Huh, Michael Clayton in space“. This isn’t really fair, but it’s not really that far off either.

It’s set in a pretty believable future, with nothing on that score to niggle at me. I know, obviously my hate machine is slowing down with old age, right? Just wait until I bother to talk about Brian Aldiss here, that’ll convince you otherwise. The setting is the moon, where the five mega-corporations of the future have created a large settlement that seems to be equal parts industrial park and tourist trap.

The first scene in the book is the only one that bothers me. One of, if not the, primary characters has arrived on the moon and is awaiting an overdue escort. Another fellow makes conversation with him, which, towards the end is becoming somewhat strange in its forced “hey let’s go hang out buddy” tones. Then another fellow flanks the main character, sits silently for a few minutes, then starts talking to the other random dude, both trying to sweep our main man off to parts unknown.

I don’t know about you, but by this point I’d have gotten the fuck out of Dodge, yet our main man never even acknowledges that this episode seems entirely like an attempt to roll a man with obvious resources.

If you can let that slide you’ll be treated to some great characters. The book builds slowly, but strongly, with only a few times where I felt something was a misstep. Characters don’t grow so much as they’re revealed, like watching someone carve a statue from raw stone, and by the end I was surprised by the revelations, yet they remained totally believable.

I look forward to digging up the next book.

This book was delightful to read. It was interesting to find a lot of parallels to my own experiences, minus the vagina and international backpacking. I suppose I shouldn’t say experiences, but rather emotions. Mostly a bag of schizophrenic voices convincing me to do things that I knew weren’t a good idea and so on.

Here and there she rolls off onto a tangential story from her childhood, which the rest of the tale clearly illustrates the dents these events left in her character, and it’s done so seamlessly that you really absorb the impact, relating it starkly against the present day her (the her as related in the story). That’s the other thing, it’s all written from that time’s perspective, rather than as a person telling you something that happened to them in the past, which I found worked very well here.

Anyway. The book is an incredibly personal look at a young person’s sex life and I highly recommend it.

I read a lot. Most of it is, to be kind, unimportant. A while back I was reading/listening to the Deathlands series. It’s set roughly 100 years after a nuclear war, primarily between the US and the USSR. It’s pulpy, but really fun. Towards the end of book two it starts to play the rough patriotism card, but reigns it in before starting to make me discard it. I had just finished the Graphic Audio version of number 18. While waiting for 19, I decided to try Doomsday Warrior, which is from the same publisher.

After only a few minutes I sensed this may have been a mistake. Let’s review what you need in an atomic apocalypse story.

1)Very few survivors, at least per place. Small population centers.

2)Poor communications. Telcos gone, radios very few and far between. Add a lack of trust and you’re off to the races.

3)Mutants of some kind, preferably somewhat believable. Rather, believable enough for what, really, is cheap entertainment.

4)General breakdown in knowledge.

That’s kind of it, I think. Aside from that you just need good writing, like any story. Let’s examine this one.

The main hero is Tom Rockson. I shit you not, his name is Rockson. He is described as being “The ultimate American”. So, that’s a red flag. Next is that while it’s indicated that 2/3rds of the world’s population, and that most of that was the flattening of the US. 100 million during the attack, 75 million within the year. Looking at census data, it seems that the population in 84, when this was written, was about 235 million. So, fine, so far so few. Could probably be less initial survivors, you know, but whatever. Now we get to hear how the Soviets “won” because they had advanced missile killers. I know, I know, the Cold War had everyone worried, but seriously. Ok, we’ll let that slide. Oh, the other thing is that the intro here describes all the main players and lays out their motivations, which is a bad sign of explainitis. Anyway. The Russians build 40 fortresses, for some reason, and take over. One minute we’re told that 90% of plants and animals are extinct, but then we’re told about mutant animals, and forests. Turns out that there’s “free cities” left, built on the edge of radioactive hot zones, which house the last AMERICANSFUCKYEAH people. 75 of the fuckers, with 1000 to 40000 people each. Living next to hell pits. Riiiiight. Described as “fiercely democratic”, and natural selection has made them 10 times more resistant to radiation, plus they use Spartan style child selection. More on that in a minute. So already we’ve broken some guidelines, in that we have a lot, like a lot a lot, of people working together with a fair amount of communication somehow.

About this rad resistance business. Ok, fine, it’s not too ludicrous to be in a story, though if you were to amplify my radiation resistance ten fold there’s still no way I could live in fallout, but we’ll let that slide for now. Having that and roughly a million people is pushing it pretty far though. Now, apparently these super democrats also put their children out into the night, where they have to survive 20 below temperatures. Yeah. This would totally allow you a population of roughly a million.

Then you get some other crap explained to you. Like the white markings on the radiation resistant generation. If I recall accurately, I’m picking this post up from an old draft, Tom there had…. STARS!! That’s right, he’s so patriotic he’s covered in stars. Jesus wept.

Finally we get to his hometown, which was built into a mountain by the survivors of some people stuck in a roadway tunnel that had the entrances collapsed during the nuclear strike. That’s right, people stuck in gridlock then trapped in a radioactive tomb survived long enough to build a city in a mountain. He wanders into this place, naturally the most advanced of the free cities, and eventually wanders into the gym, where his “She’s totally not my girlfriend, but hot sex friend” is sparring with a martial arts instructor. Not only did they survive to build a city, but they apparently had a strong kung-fu tradition to hand down. The lady eventually gets her ass handed to her, then Tom and the teacher throw down, ending in a draw, because the woman can’t be better than him, and neither can some random Chinese guy.

Sometime around then they talk about the weapons of these free cities. Instead of knocking off a million AKs or M16s, they created their own gun design, which is better than the Russian’s arms, and manage to churn out by the thousands.

So, effectively, within like 20 pages, the story as set means the Russians have lost. There is no feasible way for them to hold the region, and in fact it won’t even be a struggle, relatively speaking.

Then there’s the icing. The evil Soviets have a machine that erase your personality and imprint you with good commie thoughts. They bring one of the test subjects in to parade in front of some higher up and he starts asking if she would do this or that or the other thing. All in the affirmative. Then he asks if she would kill Tom Rockson, I believe even calling him The Ultimate American, and she starts screaming. Then she dies. Not just says “I dunno, he’s hunky” or passes out, but flat out dies.

I stopped reading about three pages beyond that, when the horror caught up to my brain.

I picked this up at the library because it was regular paperback sized. I truly expected nothing, but was rewarded for my moment of whimsy.

The story borders on the incoherent at times, but it’s fun. My only real complaints are that the flow of time feels incredibly halfassed in parts, causing the relationships between characters to have a very accelerated feeling, and there’s a couple moments where she tries to batter you with sentiments that have only formed in the crudest manner. An example. One of the crew she ends up with is an alien, who looks very human, and it turns out that his race was rendered incapable of aggression, by humans during a conflict, which, for some reason, caused us to build up this system of master and slave wherein each of them is basically adopted by a human. It’s a pretty weak concept already, but whatever, I’ve let Star Trek get away with worse. The thing that got me was this sequence where she saves his life, becoming his de-facto (is that supposed to be hyphenated??) master, then basically orders him to do whatever he wants, then he dies, choosing to save the pilot’s life. Yes, very touching. Except we never get to know anything about him beyond this stupid story point, which is there SOLELY to add a sap layer. There’s about 5 lines of interaction between him and anyone, all of them sort of vapid or bitchy. That one was the worst. What made it extra bad is that it came on the heels of another one, which I’ll go ahead and tell you about. They picked up this alien baby, from an amphibian race, and it nursed on this synthesized feed goo pasted onto people’s chests. It was cute, added the possibility for some warmth, even toed into that warmth a smidge, but wasn’t overbearing, wasn’t a look at me monkey. Then an evil scientist, which has the baby at that point, shoots the pilot with a disruptor beam, aka the turn that into meatloaf ray, hitting him in the arm. The heroine tussles with him, getting the gun, then… blasts him in the chest, doing lord knows what to the baby alien. At this point she left my mind as a hero in the rough, launching herself in that much lauded territory of being The Retarded Bitch What Shot A Baby. Seriously now, there was no reason to not shoot the bad guy in the head, pelvis, stomach, legs even, or whatever. It was an obviously calculated move to allow her to whinge about how she’s a terrible bigot and whatever. She isn’t, she’s just stupid, which is kind of worse, and sort of shadowed the character, for me, the entire rest of the story.

Don’t let those negatives throw you, however, not everything can be gold, especially on a first novel, and the book definitely has merit. The characters aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re fairly well done, and the central character is caustic, flawed, and self aware enough to be interesting. Plus the overall universe is good. I’d have to say it feels like a warm-up to what should be a great sequel.

Huh. Apparently there’s already a sequel. Let’s hope she doesn’t feel so rushed this time.

So, let’s just put this out there, I don’t enjoy reading Dick’s stories. After a lifetime of Twilight Zone and good stories his stories typically just anger me. I know, he was an important voice and did important things for sci-fi, but everything of his that I read was just… well… crap. He often insists on using a ton of dialogue, but never bothers to develop separate voices, so it’s like listening to carbon copies talk. Then there’s the BIG TWIST, which, for me, has almost no intellectual or emotional impact at all, so it leaves me wondering why bother.

The flipside is that I think it’s good to read things for their critical value, even if you don’t like them, even if they’re demonstrably bad. Like Lord of the Flies. As a story it’s terrible, as a depiction of the British world view, and the view of at least some of its citizens, it’s priceless.

So I picked this up at the library. It’s really rather enjoyable, I’m happy to say, both as a story and as a captured collection of viewpoints. Don’t read the back cover though, whomever wrote that must have just skimmed the book. The essential crux of the story is that of the Soviet/USA cold war dragging on so long that it’s become a culture unto itself, with weapon designers being the new fashion moguls. It’s a tough story to write, and at times that certainly shows, but worth reading.

Comparing this to the handful of short stories and other books of his that I’ve read, I think that what causes me to so strongly dislike his stories, typically, is because he was incredibly lazy. He makes wild leaps with no foundation, and instead of demonstrating what he wants to show you, he has a pair of clones describe it to each other. This book manages to largely avoid that, though sometimes just barely.

Go, read it, or tell me why I’m wrong.

Watched this last night. It was about 10 minutes of awesome dispersed into 90+ minutes of crap.

The basic plot is that a super virus ran rampant through Scotland some 10 years ago, so Britain walled it in, killing anyone that came near the wall. We also learn that the surrounding waters are mined and patrolled, but you never see any of that.

The breakdown begins almost immediately. We see the initial closing of Scotland, and a bunch of people being killed. Somehow a little girl has an eye shot out. I have no idea what the deal is because it either just happened too fast or just wasn’t very well thought out. That part is ok. But then we’re expected to believe that this soldier, who is part of a group evacuating in a helicopter, will give up his life for this little girl with a bloody hole instead of an eye, without even questioning if she’s infected. I’m afraid that most people would have told her to sod off and find a different plot device. Instead we get a largely boring scene, and the little girl is given a note from her mommy and trundles off to presumably be a ward of the state.

Now we skip 10 years to the story’s present. The girl, Sinclair I guess (oddly “Vagrant Girl” has top billing in IMDb), is now some sort of cop, it’s never really clear what her actual office is. We see her using her newfangled cybernetic eye to spy on criminals and look around corners. The eye isn’t well thought out, and looks sort of silly. Not terrible, but there’s a little “what the hell?” vibe to it. After rolling around on the ground she just slips it back into her seemingly still organic socket, which is just eww. So one of the bad guys has ambushed her partner and puts a shotgun to his head.  She’s advancing towards him, he’s backing away, and, for no apparent reason she just keeps advancing until the dude slips and accidentally destroys the partner’s head. She kills the bad guy and looks queasy. The whole scene was pointless, and served only to make her alone without imparting any empathy at all. Oh, and she recorded everything with her eyeball.

Something that would have been nice with the eyeball thing would have been a few shots that made use of its perspective. It would have also been nice to make it an obvious prosthetic. I mean, sure, it’s like 30 years in the future, so I guess it’s possible, but it doesn’t seem like an economically devastated country would spend that kind of scratch on an orphan, even if she is also a cop/soldier/whatever. I digress, however, but seriously they could have made much better use of the eye as a cinematic device. It doesn’t even really serve as much of a plot device, so overall a straight up eye-patch would have served them better and saved a little budget.

Ok, so partner dies, Bob Hoskins, playing her CO, has some meandering talk with her. Blah blah blah. There’s absolutely no sense of energy or cohesion so far, and that never changes. All of the actors really do a great job too, but the script and direction is so absolutely wooden that they don’t have a prayer. This movie would have been at least an order of magnitude better if nearly all of the dialogue was stripped out and they just let the interactions between these actors convey the tone. This is especially true because almost all of the dialogue is either raw exposition or emotional tone, and the exposition is largely unneeded.

Moving on, another scene. Yes, like so many failed movies this one jumps from scene to scene without ever feeling like there’s a connection. You may as well be jumping through really repetitive alternate Earths. So now we find out that the mystery disease is on the loose again, via some vector that will never be questioned let alone revealed, but, quite conveniently, they’ve also discovered survivors in Scotland, so they think there’s a cure or something to be extracted from there.

Let’s examine what’s wrong and how it could be better. This is far too convenient. This is like some really bottom of the barrel type writing. Also, wouldn’t you have been studying this disease for 10 years anyway? There was bound to be plenty of samples. Before I mention how to make it better, you have to know that the jerkwad in the government, I don’t know his title, makes it clear that they should let the disease kill off the bulk of the lower class before deploying any kind of treatment. With that known the obvious, and quite used but still better than what they went with, path would be to have it so that they already have a cure, that they are the ones that released the disease, and that this whole mission to find one is a smokescreen to make the timetables play out. Instead we get some garbage.

Scotland is a no-fly zone for some reason. I understand monitoring traffic and restricting what can fly around there, but seriously, there’s no reason that I can think of to not allow your own intelligence gathering flights. It’s not like this is an anti-jet virus. Then Sinclair is spun some story about how they can’t just fly her team in because of the no-fly zone, which is just retarded. It could make some sense if you take the story into the timetable scenario, as just a line of unquestionable bullshit, but in the actual context it’s just straight bullshit.

Skip ahead. Our heroes are looking for a lab that was ran by a dude named Kane, someplace in Glasgow. Inevitably they’re attacked by Mad Max extras. Oh, and apparently in the future we lose night vision technology completely, despite it being available at Wal-Mart currently. The team is killed or captured depending on pay grade. There’s a pretty awesome feral girl that really gets into her role, but her character wad is blown way early. Also they cook a poor bastard, oddly in his clothes despite wanting to eat him. The vague indication of hunger being an issue is truly retarded since a few minutes before we see a countryside overrun with cattle.

Getting bored. Nutshell- We switch from city punks to the countryside, where it’s ye ren-fair all the time. There’s an _ok_ gladiator style showdown with Sinclair and The Black Knight, Ted or whatever his name was. They escape, the burgeoning love interest for Sinclair dies by multiple arrows, then it’s off to the races as we revisit what should be an interesting military station but is instead hideously dull, from which they get a fancy car and belt off to play Road Warrior. At this point the native girl asks what the car does, despite having seen cars and buses already in the film, in a place where she was, and yet more cars in the Mad Max road chase scene.

Skip further ahead. I’m bored just writing this, so let’s wrap up with just some consistent faults in the film, along with some good stuff.

The writing is terrible. It’s not even cliche, it’s just dull.
The cinematography is pure crap. It skips around stroboscopically and is generally more headache generating than the now omni-present shaky-cam.
Areas that could have been of interest contain nothing or are never gotten back to, while hideously boring crap is revisted over and over.
The car Sinclair ends up going randomly Mad Max in is hardly blemished, despite crashing through an exploding bus. Yeah, you read that right.

Good stuff.
Sets and costumes were generally well done and entertaining.
The actors were wonderful.

There is only one truly good scene in the movie. It’s at the very end. Sinclair takes the head of the Mad Maxian’s leader back to them and it’s pretty obvious that she’s just taken over. The look on her face is this pitch perfect expression of someone about to go nuts with total freedom and power, after having lived in a repressed soceity for so long. I really like that this is where you leave her as well, opening her actual ending up to your imagination, which even if you’re dull will be a dozen times better than what these people would write.

This movie could have been great, but you would have had to fire a whole mess of people and get a really strong editor onboard. It needed gutting and de-bullshitting.

Christ this was a long and dull post.

So I’m installing Vista Home Basic for a client. This is my first time doing it, so I figured I’d record my thoughts here. I mean, Vista is crap, let’s not think for a second that’ll change, but I’m willing to give a fair shake to the install process.

Currently I’m staring at the default sort of borealis looking background and a mouse cursor. There appears to be some activity.

As an aside, I don’t know why SMART is disabled by default in so many boards.

There we go. About 4 minutes of waiting for the first step of the installer.

Second “step” is just a “What you should know before taking it deep in the pooper” and “Let Windows fail to repair your computer”. Naturally these are just my cynical translations.

Now waiting some more. About 3 minutes to get to the product key entry screen.

Waiting again. “Only” about a minute to bring up the license agreement, which I already accepted, apparently, by opening the cd package.

Haha. Now we have two options. Upgrade, which is greyed out because this is a new drive, or “Custom(advanced)” which is just a clean install.

There looks like some driver loading options on the disk screen, which is a step up from frantically hitting F6. Now moving on to “Installing Windows”.
About 10 minutes on that screen, now rebooting.

Preparing to start for the first time. Thankfully that only took a few seconds. Now we’re “completing installation”. This appears to be a hardware detection routine, judging from the screen blanking. Now a black screen, at first with a mouse cursor, but now just black. Looks like the monitor has lost signal. I… can only assume that something has gone awry. I think 3 minutes is long enough, time to reset.

Alrighty then. Now we’re at the account creation screen. A few more basic settings. Now Windows is “checking the computer’s performance”. Christ this seems like a waste of time. Thank goodness this is an advanced install, where this sort of thing is skippable…. oh.

Coming up on 10 minutes of this performance check.

Well. Over 30 minutes of that, let’s see if resetting will skip it. We will be bold and select “Start Windows Normally”.

It’s forced me back to the “create a user” section, even though apparently the user I made is already there. Off to the races? No. I’m staring at the background, no cursor or icons, watching it flog the hard drive.

Keep in mind, this a pretty good workstation. 2GB of RAM, DDR2 800, and a 2.4GHz dual core AMD. Thankfully it seems to have skipped the performance shit this time.

Man. That was unacceptable. Wastes of time everywhere, and very little benefit. The only improvement, in real terms, is the driver section for storage. That’s literally it.

It’s boring AND pointless, even beyond the norms of most MMO games. Maybe that’s an unfair comparison, since this isn’t a game in any way.

Imagine, if you will, that Yahoo’s dubious groups were vomited into a 3d… presentation I guess since it isn’t a game and realm sounds way too grandiose.

So, I’ve started reading this, in between reading all of the Bond books. It’s from the early 50’s, which is important to keep in mind when reading it.

I’m only a short ways in, through the first tale and into the second. The thesis this is written under is similar to a lot of stories I’ve read from that period, with the addition of sentient dogs. Really they aren’t even an addition, since I don’t get the impression you interact with them in the slightest. So, the basic thought pattern, thus far, is that technology, specifically personal aircraft and cheap, clean (hah!), nuclear power have made cities obsolete. Everyone moves to the country, with incentives from the government, in order to make nuclear war “impractical”. You have to let these statements slide, because duh, the 50’s. This sort of naivety is rampant in sci-fi of the time. No, I don’t know why anyone thought a dominant species with increasing birth rates and longevity would be able to spread out with 10 to 100 acres to a family.

Still, it got me thinking. I’ve come up with nothing new, but it did remind me of other things I’ve read, which seem to hold true enough to be what gave me pause at Simak’s assertions about people, as a whole, wanting to live in a country scene. To make a gross generalization of my own, there’s effectively two types of people, those that chafe psychologically at close contact with others, and those that thrive in it. It’s held true throughout our development where a segment of a population decides “fuck it, I’m outta here”, and they wander to some obscure part of the world, generating a new frontier. After them come people that aren’t really sure about this frontier stuff, but see a profit to be made from trading with the crazy people. From there you have a steady influx of support structures and people that are more and more the city type, until bam, you have a city, or at least a concentrated group of humans. By this point the wandering folks are old, and settle into a rural community to farm, mine, ranch, or whatever with their families. Eventually it gets to be too much for some of the people there, and off they go again, to make new frontiers.

There’s always some justification, like gold, beaver pelts, or whatever, but I really think it’s just a genetic impulse, driving them from groups of people and into new territories. It’s a good life strategy, because it helps maximize our diversity and strengths. You have a few people that go out, get strange diseases, killed by strange animals, or die off from other inhospitable conditions, and then the survivors eventually breed back into the main line. Misfits always drive evolution. Errors that turn up uniquely useful.

Ok, so this isn’t really a review of the book, but rather some meandering thoughts I had. So far there’s little to distinguish this from other books of the time, except for a really idealized version of dogs. Apparently the author never saw packs of dogs running around, forgetting the civillity we train them into. I like dogs, a lot, but the idea that they wouldn’t fight or make wars, given the capability, is pretty thin. Nibbler once ran around stabbing the walls with a knife she stole from an open dishwasher, and really it was just a matter of time before that went bad, know what I mean?

PS- I’m not a fan of the latest layout of WordPress’ article writer panel.

So, I decided to upgrade to 8.04, from 7.10, and to also move to 64bit. Went with a clean install, mostly to eradicate all the weird things I had done with my previous profile.

Anyway, thus far it’s great. Firefox 3 Beta 5 is the default browser, and it mostly works very well. Fonts look a lot nicer in it. I didn’t even realize how crapulent they really were before until seeing the new renderer. I like the unlock mechanism for control panels, even if it did take me a few minutes to notice what was going on. The idea of Gnome VFS is nice, but we’ll see.

There are some issues I’ve had. One is that while copying things my open apps would hang in time rather frequently. I can only imagine that’s because of something in the VFS system. I’m hoping it was a fluke, due to some indexing going on, or will be patched soon. Moving files, however, is lightning fast, even compared to regular linux cases. This says quite a bit, since linux just changes pointers on the filesystem when a “move” is made, making the normal operation rather fast already. Skype is still a bunch of slackers, with not 64 bit version to show. Undoubtedly we’ll have to wait through 6 revisions of the Windows client before another update worth a damn shows up. From a straight architecture point of view, memory intense apps, like Virtualbox virtual machines, run a lot faster than before. I’m not sure why this is, since I only have 2GB of RAM, plus whatever is on my video card, but it’s nice.

So, thus far, thumbs up.